<p>I really love Gothic architecture. You know… the gargoyles and stuff. lol.</p>
<p>Do you guys know of any prep schools that have gothic architecture? I’m just curios… :)</p>
<p>SPS sounds like your school.</p>
<p>St. George’s has a gothic style church. The ultimaTE imo. Emma Willard. It’s appears to be quite beautiful. My D and W visited EWS over the summer and thought it was more beautiful in person. They also commented that the surrounding area seemed a bit rough.</p>
<p>I agree with prepparent–the architecture at Emma Willard is amazing. Much prettier than Duke or Yale even.</p>
<p>if you like gargoyles, emma will not disappoint.</p>
<p>Too bad that’s an all-girl’s school… lol.</p>
<p>I don’t know Emma Willard. I do know that the Vaughn chapel of SS Peter and Paul at SPS is perhaps the finest example of neo-gothic in America and that the setting enhances the effect of an english parish church. Vaugh did another chapel at Groton. It is not sited as well as the sps chapel and is quite a bit smaller. It is also worth a visit but not as absolutely stunning as the sps chapel which has the glass, the altar reredo and the misericord stalls that go with the gothic.</p>
<p>Also…</p>
<p>What do you guys think is the most intense, cut-throat competitive high school out there? I’d love to go to a school like this, so I was just wondering. :)</p>
<p>YOU don’t want to go to a cut throat competitive school if it’s your throat that gets cut. Believe me, you have absolutely no idea of what you would be up against.</p>
<p>Why on earth would you want to go to a school like that?</p>
<p>Maybe it’s just that I’m a professional academic, but I think a great school is one in which students are challenged to take joy in learning and intellectually engaging others, not one where they just fight to be better than their neighbor. When people who value their prep school experiences like paleo talk about it, they’re not waxing poetic about what competitive jerks their classmates were. They talk about how the school opened new horizons for them–new intellectual spaces, new understandings of community, new spiritual possibilities.</p>
<p>One of my friends, attending a different college, once urged me to go to the library as soon as a midterm question was assigned and move the relevant books to a different part of the library so others couldn’t find them. I was horrified. His rationale was that if I didn’t do it, someone else would–and if I checked them out my classmates could recall them. Supposedly this had happened to him in college more than once. THAT is cutthroat competition–competition without integrity. And it’s pathetic. If I were an admissions rep, I would seriously question the character of an applicant who claimed to want such an environment. I would assume that s/he was applying to my school not for the lifechanging experience, but for the sake of proving that he was “better” than his colleagues on the crassest possible criteria.</p>
<p>No, I wouldn’t go to boarding school because I want to prove that I’m better, because most likely, I’m not.</p>
<p>I just think it’s fun to be competitive, and I’d want to be around people who are competitive as well.</p>
<p>where’s the leadership and spirit of teamwork in your statements, Jonathon?
Once again, I think you have the wrong focus in your search for a school - gothic architecture? Cut-throat competition?</p>
<p>Gothic architecture and competitive? Sounds like Winchester perhaps the greatest of the English Public Schools after which the american preps are modelled. Motto above the dining table at winchester? “Learn, leave or be beaten” Doesn;t sound like your kind of school kid</p>
<p>Trust me Jonathan, you wouldn’t want a school that was that competitive. It seems like any of the boarding schools that you are looking at would be competitive–to a point.</p>
<p>Forget it.</p>
<p>It wasn’t meant to be taken this seriously.</p>
<p>You said it and now you have to take responsibility for your actions. Go to your room right now, young man! :)</p>
<p>Man…</p>
<p>geniuses are mean.</p>
<p>Jonathan: one of these days you’ll be interviewing for Greenhills which is about as far away from a cut throat environment as you can get and seems by all accounts a very good fit for you. I know you like to set intellectual hares running but sometimes you get snared in your own web. Anyway, in historical terms, American prep schools were modelled after British public schools. Andover and Exeter because they are the original american preps still have a bit of the competitive colouration of British preps before Arnolds reforms at Rugby (Tom Brown Schooldays and all that). St. Paul’s was the first foundation after the Rugby reforms and to some extent was a blend Arnold and Peztalozzi pedagogical ideas within a high-church setting. That why it is still a little different from Exeter and Andover. Groton, probably the normative american "prep’ if there is such a thing was also part of the high church revival but took its educational ideal from the French Lycee. The French Lycee route to the Grande Ecoles is relentlessly darwinian. Milton, another school that is in the Lycee tradition and like Middlesex a Harvard feeder school is also quite competitive in a good sense. That is to say: focus and intellectual self discipline. You above all don’t strike me as somebody who would flourish at Milton. Count your blessings that on CC you have discovered people who will tell you when you are once again “over the top”.</p>
<p>Pomfret has the most beautiful and authentic looking neo-gothic chapel I have seen in a school, including St. Pau’ls. </p>
<p>The rest of its buildings are neo-georgian – handsome, but different.</p>
<p>leanid, that’s so interesting in that Pomfret does not seem to feature the chapel in any special way on their web site or view book. My wife and d visited the campus over the summer but, did not go inside any of the buildings. They did say the campus is “beautiful”.</p>