The XX Factor: What women really think.

In Defense of Regular Old Public Day School

E.J., Bonnie, let me be the voice of dissent. What a teen is missing when he or she boards is the joy of belonging to a community with deep roots. I lived in the same small, suburban town of 6,000 residents for my first 18 years, and even though I was quite ready to leave at age 18, I found great pleasure and solace in our little village. I loved being part of the town sports teams with girls I had known since I was five; I loved biking to my friends' houses and being welcomed by their parents, who knew my parents, who all attended town hall meetings together; I loved sneaking through the woods at night to clandestine keg parties, knowing that ultimately there was little danger in our experimenting.

Yes, Dayo, boarding school may let teens have deeper relationships with teachers, but actually when kids go to boarding school and college, they end up interacting exclusively with their peers much more than they do when they are at home or in the workplace. E.J., I think it's a little histrionic to ask whether or not it's "healthy" for anyone to live at home while they're minors. I was a reasonably mature, well-adjusted teen, and I know that I wasn't ready to leave home before college. I have friends who discovered cocaine for the first time at their tony New England boarding schools, and because there was no adult checking in on them and only them, they really drifted into some dangerously unfettered behavior.  I guess what I'm saying is that when teens are sent away and don't rise to the occasion as Bonnie's daughter did, it could do more harm than good.

The Benefits of a Boarding School Education

I'm glad Dayo commented about public boarding programs. I once had a particular affection for the Baraka School, a now-defunct boarding program, sponsored in part by the Baltimore Public School System that boarded at-risk 7^th and 8^th grade boys at a school in Kenya. Baraka eventually closed in 2003 because of political instability in the host country but, while it existed, it had a good record of graduating students to academic and personal success. Baltimore was sufficiently impressed with the results to encourage the D.C. SEED School to open a campus in the harbor city.  I agree with E.J. that the boarding school model has strong historic traditions and want to add another argument in favor of distant education: the great opportunity for personal development. For a certain personality, the time away from home is a wake up call for maturity, at least as effective as outward bound. 

Our 1-year experience with boarding school when my daughter was a teenager had the salutary effects of reform school with fewer of the negative influences. I married when she was 12 and there was a period of "acting out" that was particularly disruptive at her private 7-12 school. I have mercifully forgotten every detail of the many trips to the stern but genuinely concerned school head mistress's office before my daughter was invited not to come back for 10^th grade.  It was 1987 and the D.C. public school system was not a good fit for a girl who naturally gravitated to the least challenging environment. We hired an "educational consultant" who steered us to a friendly, low admission threshold, residential school in upstate New York. It was a tough year. I missed my daughter insanely, and the tuition was twice as much as we were paying at the day school. Despite a dip in her academic performance, the year away did a world of good for her however, and, incidentally, for the family. So good for the family, in fact, that during the nine months of her sophomore year of high school away, I incubated and delivered a new member to it. My 16-year-old came back in the spring to a new brother and her parents in the last steps of moving into our new home.

Life moves on, with or without you in it.  To my great joy, she wanted to be in it.  She contacted the headmistress of her former school and asked politely, could she come back for 11^th grade? To my surprise and deep relief, the formidable educator unblinkingly enrolled my newly respectful headstrong teenager in with her old classmates. I never asked but I think what persuaded the director was that my daughter went on her own to ask the favor.  In that year away, she had learned to be both self-sufficient and deeply appreciative of the support of loved ones. The coda is when she graduated with her class in 1990, the faculty honored my girl with a "Phoenix Award," named for the mythical creature that emerges from her own ashes. They created the tribute just for her, but kept the tradition alive for future self-reinvention cases.    

Traditional Childrearing: Send Them Away Before They Are Adolescents!

Dayo, you write that you were sent away to boarding school at age 14. In that, you had a more traditional upbringing than most Americans.

Contrary to popular opinion, American children now spend far more time living under the same roof with their bio-parents than have most children in Western history. Traditionally—by which I mean, until capitalism separated work from home—children were sent away to live with others somewhere between ages 8 and 14 (at the latest). The aristocracy sent adolescents off to be pages and maids-in-waiting, to get an education in manners. Working folks sent children off to be apprentices (boys) or domestics (girls—although some girls might instead work in laundry, spinning, or weaving). They'd work for about 7 to 10 years, when they'd finally be paid (no weekly wages!), giving them a lump sum that was enough to marry and start a little shop of their own. Working through adolescence was how most girls earned their dowries and boys learned their trade...and how most working women (and aristocrats as well) avoided being their own children's nannies. Adult women ran the house and shop, in partnership with their husbands. Diaper-wiping was the work of teenagers.

That was the system even if you were lucky enough to have two bio-parents who survived until you were an adult. Most lost at least one parent before then, and had to live under a step-parental regime (cf: Cinderella), or, for impoverished gentry, were sent off to be governesses or law clerks.

Which makes me wonder: Is it a healthy system for anyone, parents or children, to keep adolescents home until age 18? But I agree that boarding schools for poor children whose parents are in flux and financial distress might be a good—or at least, a very traditional—idea.

Send Them Away Already

I’m really glad Kai Wright wrote about a boarding school experiment for kids in poor public schools. He frets about disconnecting teens from their families—which could have particularly pernicious effects on black households. I dissent: Having attended boarding school hundreds of miles from home from age 14 on, I think the experience is well worth it. All other things (East Coast WASP culture, cough, cough) being equal, boarding school provides first-class, real-time instruction on how to fend for yourself—setting your own bedtime, developing study skills on your own, managing money—at an age when these skills are most prone to underdevelopment, perhaps losing out to after-school deliberations over whether to get plain or pepperoni from the local slice joint.

I don't know tons about the sleepaway plan (read the Time piece), but Barack Obama has already come out and said that he favors a longer school day and school year (American kids spend less time in school than kids in just about any industrialized nation). Why not take it a step further and institute the faintly Colonial, but more rigorous six-day school week I had in high school?

The big knock on boarding school, actually, seems to come from clingy parents:

"It sounds very exciting, but the devil is in the details," says Ellen Bassuk, president of the National Center on Family Homelessness in Newton, Mass. "What's it like to separate a third- or fifth-grader from their parents?"

My parents left for boarding school in Nigeria at age 11, and so at 14 I was definitely not allowed to whine about my “disconnected” educational experience. I know every child is different—but I think the option of greater discipline (and deeper relationships with teachers) should be available to more children, particularly from underserved and underperforming school districts. Maybe I'll feel different when I have my own chickadees, but for now, parents and policymakers shouldn’t brandish family ties as a weapon against what could be, as Kai writes, a “holistic education solution.” What do you think?

(cross-posted at the Browntable)