Private School to Boarding School

soxmom
Thu, 25 Apr 2013 15:58:24 +0000

I’d second peteri’s comments, and add a bit more. You can find day schools (private and public) that have academic curriculum and expectations as challenging as the top boarding schools. To my mind, what really sets boarding schools apart and which even the best day schools can’t replicate, is the immersive nature of the learning. Your child will be around teachers and other adults 24/7 who have a passion for learning and teaching, and your child will experience that in class, on the playing fields, in extra-curriculars, in the dining hall, in the dorms on weekends, etc. Those teachers not only convey that passion to the students, but they share it with each other – keeping the adult community at a boarding school (meaning teachers, administration, and spouses) engaged and committed to learning. They are learning from each other, sharing ideas, collaborating on projects for inside and outside the classroom. Your kid gets to be the beneficiary of this!
I went to boarding school myself; at the time what I would have told you was that I loved it because I got to live with all my friends. Looking back on it many years later, though, my most enduring memories are of the conversations that I had with my teachers OUTSIDE the classroom – the time my favorite English teacher took a couple of us apple picking on a Saturday afternoon and then taught us how to press cider because it related to a book we’d read recently in class; the time my advisor took me to visit a college because my parents lived far away and couldn’t come do college visits with me; the zillions of times that conversations started in class about poetry or literature or biology were finished later that night in the dining hall or days later walking back from the athletic fields.
On top of that, you have kids who all want to be there too (ok, with maybe the occasional exception) and who think it’s cool to be smart, and accomplished, and interested in the world around them. And many of whom, as you pointed out, come from different countries, or socio-economic backgrounds, or ethnicities.