Does boarding school "ruin" your college experience?

Prep School Admissions
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<p>I don't want to hijack the thread, but since the question was directed at me:</p>

<p>We've been state homeschool leaders for many years and have known thousands of homeschoolers from all over the world. There are as many different reasons for homeschooling as there are for sending your children to public or private schools - there is no one type of homeschool family. Most of the reasons I hear, though, come down to this: freedom.</p>

<p>Freedom to tailor a curriculum to a child - a student with a learning disability can get one on one help and be on or above grade level in some subjects and where they need to be in their disability subjects. I know a very dyslexic 5th grader doing 8th grade science and 1st grade spelling. On the other hand, a gifted student can be challenged as much as possible and suffer no social consequences - her friends in the homeschool group are all using different curriculums, so no one cares.</p>

<p>Freedom to do more and go farther - I know families with 10+ APs who live in districts with little or no AP program. There are internet courses, local co-ops, tutors, and dual enrollment, so you aren't hampered by what your parents can handle.</p>

<p>Freedom to travel - We know homeschoolers who live overseas for part of the year, others who travel throughout the US during their studies, some would never see their parents if they were tied to a classroom.</p>

<p>Freedom to specialize for the child - A student can pursue research, work with experts in the field (an economics-oriented student did AP Microeconomics with a real economist and a couple of friends). A student can take off a month in the middle of the year to focus on ice-skating or film a winter movie, then work later to catch up.</p>

<p>Freedom to change your schedule - If Dad has a business trip to Boston during the school year, the whole family packs up and does two weeks of field study - Lexington and Concord, Plymouth, Lowell's industrialization sites, all of Boston, Cape Cod, New Bedford's whaling museum... One family went to Asia for several weeks in the middle of the school year. Others just feel free to take a day off when Dad's off.</p>

<p>Freedom to pass on your values - You're there every day to talk to your children and interact with them - makes for very close families.</p>

<p>Freedom to interact with the real world - A student interested in politics has an internship one day a week with a thinktank. Children are there when mom pays taxes, interacts with neighbors, goes to a political protest, calls her legislator, pays bills, volunteers with the food pantry, etc. Homeschool group activities (There are over a hundred groups in our state and our local group has over 400 kids) have different ages interacting. We generally don't do age segregation.</p>

<p>So, I know I've written a book (an unedited one :-), but I've seen so much misunderstanding of homeschooling on this site, I wanted to really give you a better picture of this alternative. </p>

<p>Huguenot Mom</p>

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<p>I saw varying patterns in bs students. Four decades ago, all boarding schools had a lot of academic indifferents (see GWB's bio). There has been a watershed change in the historically elite schools, corresponding to changes in the Ivies which they have long fed, with slacker legacies either having to straighten up substantially, and put at least a modicum of effort into study, or be expelled. There are, however, bses that primarily serve a mission of taking kids whose parents "cannot handle" them at home. There are bses in between these extremes. There is no bs alumnus archetype.</p>

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<p>"Homeschooling was born, in recent history, out of religious beliefs and fear of outside influences." </p>

<p>Public education was born, in recent history (150 years on the human timeline is recent), for the social purpose of rapidly converting agrarian economies into industrial ones. </p>

<p>There were several essential premises. Most of the students would fill low-wage jobs in the industrial pyramid. Entrainment to tedium, obedience to authority, and limiting students' learning, to prevent them from aspiring to escape the plan set by the masters of the industrial universe, for example by being educated enough to go to college, were fundamental mandates. </p>

<p>Operating schools at low cost was a natural corollary of producing low-wage workers. This translated into using not-well-educated women, overwhelmingly. (The derogation of these women led to teachers' unionization. They "got it" that they were lowly-valued workers in an industrial scheme.) </p>

<p>The industrial system itself was predicated on creating workers whose individual output was low, i.e. based on manual effort without higher-faculty usage, but when the work output value was amassed, it generated high aggregated economic value for the capitalists. To wit, the combined education/ employment system undervalued most people.</p>

<p>Public education had to be forced, because without compulsory attendance, "too many people" would reject it, which would have scuttled the objective of rapid mass industrialization employing millions of tractable laborers, and the industrialists' accumulation of capital. </p>

<p>In the "Bong Hits 4Jesus" case, Justice Thomas's arguments are most enlightening. He correctly (i.e. his case-researching clerks) identified the principle of In Loco Parentis undergirding public education in its formativeyears (and Thomas judged this still held today): the state's forcible arrogation of child-raising duties from parents. Compulsory public education was enabled through the Police Powers doctrine, which of note was not specifically enumerated in the U.S. Constitution. Truants could be arrested, and their parents fined, or even incarcerated for repeat offenses. Education = police power? Hmm. Interesting</p>

<p>Public education was, and is, a sorting machine. If a student was substantially confused in a subject, he or she was given a C, which was called "satisfactory". No special help was given to enlighten the child and raise his or her performance to a B, much less an A. (Minority children are now broadly being given help, in the wake of NCLB. A rather tardy intervention.)</p>

<p>Students who on their own effort and intelligence earned As were promoted to college, because the private-educated wealthy class was too small to fill all professional and managerial posts. This being said, only an estimated 1 out of 10 public school students made it to college, before the GI Bill program created mass public postsecondary education opportunities.</p>

<p>Public education has always used semi-educated teachers. It started with giving grammar-school-graduate 14 year old girls a year of normal school training. Then high school graduates were given 2 years of teacher training. This evolved, under the elitist-architects' instigation, to four years of training, starting at Columbia University Teachers College (and then TC became a generic term). </p>

<p>For several decades high school teachers (who taught the small minority of teenagers who didn't enter the workforce after 8th grade) had traditional college degrees. This model was changed in the 1950s as policymakers decided that everyone should go to high school, and high-school teacher training was transferred to the teachers colleges. The new scheme limited high school teachers' own education in academic subject matter. Today, anyone can go to a community college with a university-transfer program, take all the academic courses there in the subject the student wants to get certified in, and after transferring, fulfill the secondary-certificate requirements with 2-3 university courses in the subject. The candidate's college of education-conferred degree says "major" in the subject, while non-teacher-track subject-major students typically have 10 or more junior-senior courses in the given subject. </p>

<p>(Of note, the selective private schools today still employ teachers with regular college of arts and sciences degrees, as all secondary schools did before WWII. Funny that the privates haven't "evolved" with the public secondary teacher-education paradigm. What "secret" do they know?)</p>

<p>The glitch is that public secondary teachers have to take ca. 40 credit hours in education courses in junior-senior years, ranging from ed psych to classroom management, and something has to give in a 4-year curriculum, so what is given up is higher-level academic subject coursework taken by the non-teacher-track students.</p>

<p>The "best" public education programs are elitist. You cannot attend Stuyvesant, Bronx High School for Science, Lowell, Davidson, Thomas Jefferson Science & Technology, or any 11th-12th grade public residential academy, just because you think you would enjoy the experience. Even if you're a very good student. You are admitted only if you have excelled in the preliminary sorting machine. </p>

<p>The University of California, at Berkeley originally guaranteed admission to the top 12.5% of California high school graduates. Today, it's basically top 5% for white and Asian-American applicants.</p>

<p>The University of Wisconsin, at Madison guaranteed admission to the top 50% of the state's high school graduates. Now, if you're not in the top 20%, you can forget admission, except in fields like allied healthcare, teacher-training and agricultural sciences. The University of Texas, at Austin used to have open admission. Now you have to be in the top 10% of the hs graduate pool.</p>

<p>For those who have risen to the top in the sorting machine, it is easy enough to be proud of your accomplishment, although your parents have played a huge role that you will not fully appreciate until you become parents. You didn't rise to the top on your own. But what about the kids who didn't make it? The ones who didn't have parents reading to them at bedtime at age 2-3, followed by having their kids read to them at bedtime at age 5, and who couldn't provide help on math homework, except maybe elementary arithmetic?</p>

<p>What the best private education, including homeschooling is about, is providing special inputs to enable children to do better than the public sorting machine allows. This can allow not especially talented teenagers to play sports, work on the yearbook, join academic and community service clubs, and make contributions to their private schools. </p>

<p>A home-educated musically talented student can get morning or early-afternoon lessons from a top-notch private teacher who has no openings for the next two years in the after-school hours. She may even give the student a little extra time that she couldn't in her after-school lessons. </p>

<p>If some home-educated kids like math, they can spend 2-3 hours on it. (That's cheating! Math is required to be taught for only 50 minutes a day! You're talking about giving home-educated kids an "unfair advantage".) Some start calculus at age 13 or 14. (How many middle schools offer calculus? How many of the public sorting machines apply acceleration to their exceptionally math-talented sortees so they are prepared to take calculus in 9th or 10th grade?)</p>

<p>The best time to teach most kids math, a difficult subject with an arcane language, is in the morning. Who decided that math classes should be taught after lunch, when kids have postprandial "letdown" (power nap time for executives while the proles work) or at the end of the day, when they are fatigued? Bureaucrats who had no interest in optimizing children's mathematics learning.</p>

<p>The vast majority of colleges and universities are happy to have home-educated students. Stanford has a special admissions office for home-educated applicants. </p>

<p>My brother-in-law told me it seemed to him that his home-educated dental patients were mostly studying the Bible. This impression overrode his knowledge that his own home-educated nephew was a University of Pennsylvania CS assistant professor, his niece was a successful manager, having graduated with honors from Berkeley, and another was an Ivy League undergraduate. (How do people deal with cognitive dissonance? Most choose one set of observations and put out of their minds a conflicting set.)</p>

<p>My home-educated son did some play-writing and performing, painted (he was offered a Chautauqua summer fellowship), did a NASA internship, studied abroad, and taught school in Africa. Growing up he visited Europe twice (once in November, don't try this with regular schooling), the Caribbean and Latin America. He lives in NYC, which he thinks is an amazing place. His neighborhood is populated by immigrants from Europe, Asia, Latin America, Africa and the Caribbean.</p>

<p>I suppose home-education can breed isolationism. That didn't happen for us, nor for growing numbers of families whose motive is to test unconventional paradigms and explore life's potentialities. </p>

<p>Education is an ongoing experiment. It must be in times of fundamental upheaval, as it was in the agrarian to industrial shift, and now in the industrial to postindustrial shift. The question is, do you want to be public education's experimental subject, or do you want to conduct your own experiments? There are risks no matter what you do. Do you want to be conformed to a bureaucratic industrial-design "education factory" mold, or do you want to be free to think and grow as a human being and independently nourish your potential? </p>

<p>One of my sons studied The Great Books and painted on his own initiative. (He took a University of Chicago philosophy course in a high school program that offered kids enrollment in university classes. This was an upper-division course. Most of the other students were third and fourth years. He loved it, and his professor apparently relished having a teenager with an inquiring mind. (At least an A for the course and a rec letter suggest the latter.) </p>

<p>Another wasn't interested in these things, but he liked music and creative writing. </p>

<p>Our kids were freed from being fit into somebody else's program. Their own inclinations governed their pathways. I provided resources and advisement.</p>

<p>Our experiment isn't over. It continues as my kids create their own life pathways. They will have to determine how they want their children to be educated. If the elder stays in New York, he and his spouse may choose to home-educate, or they may choose private K-8 and public Stuyvesant or maybe Feldston School. Our kids will build and cross their own bridges and go places their parents couldn't.</p>

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<p>To respond about some reluctance to live in a dorm after being in one in boarding school, as a senior in boarding school i have loved my four years living in a dorm and forming close bonds with my classmates and am looking forward to doing the same in college at least for my first year or so...</p>

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<p>Boarding School does not ruin college, but it does change it. For me, I knew that many of the things people at college were trying to do (get a good education, establish their own identity, distance themselves from home and parents) were things I had already done. My goals for college were different, and they weren't academic. I was personally focused on learning real-world skills that boarding school hadn't given me (I worked in service jobs all through college, and this was the best thing I did). I got switched to a different roommate at the last moment in college, my new roommate was a Sophomore. She didn't know I was a Freshman until Thanksgiving. I found other Freshman sort of exhausting. They were so caught up in the newness of it all. And they didn't have the lessons I had learned in Boarding School about social dynamics in dorms and in new school situations. </p>

<p>Most of the people I know found boarding school to be much more challenging academically than their colleges were. This depends on the college and the person and the boarding school, obviously. But enough people have that experience that it has some truth in it. It was true for me.</p>

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<p>from what you've told me I don't know about homeschooling</p>

<p>-I think it's kind of elitist for parents who aren't extensively educated in a field to say that they can teach their kid better than someone who is
-chances are your parent isn't going to know more than what the textbook says
-if the only critiscism you ever get is from your mom who thinks you're a prodigy, what do you think is going to happen in the real world?
-how does someone get social skills when they spend most of their day with their mom and brother?
-ledgit yearbooks and lit magazines aren't possible
-how can you ever make your own opinion on something if they only side of the argument you've ever heard is that of your parent?
-sex ed
-school pride is pretty much only the pride that your parents get when they see how well you score on a standerdized test
-any parent that thinks that their child wants to spend their entire life with them is wrong</p>

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<p>I would not call it "ruin", but boarding for several years pre-college does affect your dorm experience. My son was really sick of dorms, and found that college dorms were pretty distracting. As noted, there are enough rules in prep school to keep things fairly quiet at night and you can adhere to a schedule. Not so in college. My son had a single freshman year in college, and still couldn't wait to get out of the dorm and off-campus. That said, he certainly didn't categorize his friends based on who had gone to prep school and who hadn't. I also don't think it helped him manage his drinking and other activities just because he had been "on his own" for a few years. College is not boarding school.</p>

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<p>My parents, public school students who both went to Princeton, said they absolutely hated the boarding school students they met. They found them obnoxious, self-centered, and, having been cooped up in boarding school with people who were all the same as them, very out of touch with the the real world.</p>

<p>So it's obviously different for different people.</p>

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<p>Very interesting comments! I love reading the different perspectives.</p>

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<p>rose&clovers: </p>

<p>You're thinking of home schooling in a very stereotypical sense. It's a common conception, but it's not one that's representative of all experiences.</p>

<p>Home schooling does not necessarily involve parent + kid sitting in the kitchen all day every day, while the parent teaches to his/her own level and the kid gets no exposure to anything else in the world. The courses of study often involve online courses, community college courses, other tutors, charter school classes, field trips, and the same variety*of teaching methods that you'd see in traditional classrooms (including many which are designed to aid parent whose kids have "outgrown" the factual knowledge that they're able to offer). District curricula often comes into play, regular textbooks may be used, some classes may even be taken *at a public school. There are many different ways to structure (and supplement) a "home" program.</p>

<p>Also, in HomeschoolDad's post, when he referenced yearbook and lit magazines, I believe that he was speaking about alternatives to public school, not home school specifically. Those alternatives include private schools, which certainly do have legitimate versions of such publications (as do many charter or alternative school programs).</p>

<p>I'll leave the details up to someone better qualified to provide them. My sister was home/charter schooled for many years (also educated in both publics and privates at different times), and many, many of my friends were home/charter/etc. schooled (I was in a sport for which alternative schooling was very common, and sometimes seen as a necessity). Home schooling isn't for all kids or all families, but in many (I'm tempted to say "most") cases, it's very different than what you seem to be thinking of.</p>

<p>ETA: This might best be addressed in a thread of its own. People seem to be curious, and I imagine there's a lot of misunderstanding floating around.</p>

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<p>southeastitan- Things may be different now from when your parents went to public school. There is a lot more diversity in boarding schools and I certainly would not call today's boarding school experience being "cooped up". In fact, the opportunities offered are amazing.</p>

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<p>As someone who was homeschooled for much of middle school and then went to boarding school, I'll try to weigh in. Almost all of my homeschooling was self-motivated - my mother had very little part of it. English and Math I did through CTY; I had a once-a-week Latin tutor. But the rest was...just me. I read books, worked on my French and Italian, signed up for French-language drama classes, etc. I was living in Paris and Rome at the time, and the cities themselves were my schools. I was able to go at my own pace, which was great - I ended up skipping a year at Exeter because of the preparation I'd had. And, when it came to college choice, I chose Oxford because I knew that I thrived best in an entirely self-determined, self-motivated environment. It's not for all kids, to be sure, but it's great for some. It certainly was great for me. (Admittedly, I was a bit of a social retard my freshman year - but what freshman isn't? I learned.)</p>

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<p>Yes, to a certain extent, boarding school has changed since my parents' days. But while boarding school does provide opportunities to meet international students and go on service trips (plus lots of academic opportunities), it stills offer an extremely narrow worldview. You are only exposed to a type of student with the resources and/or commitment to get into the school, and you still remain in a relatively closed environment without exposure to real economic and social diversity.</p>

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still remain in a relatively closed environment without exposure to real economic and social diversity.

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Perhaps the high school you attended (or are attending) does offer that type of economic and social diversity. I can tell you, at my high school, there isn't much social diversity (you are either white or asian) and it only has one economic class: upper middle class. Whereas at a boarding school, especially a top tiered school that pulls children from all over the world, you meet students from all walks of life, whose parents make anywhere from less than $20K per year to millions of dollars. They come from every state in the union and at least 20 - 25 different countries. I was really surprised at the social and economic diversity when I visited the schools I am applying to.</p>

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<p>you're not totally wrong about the diversity, but it's often times a token thing. yeah, there might be kids from 25-30 states; 1 from wisconsin, 1 georgia, and 200 from connecticut. there might be a few kids who come from legitimately poor backgrounds (although often people will fudge the truth about this to get financial aid, scholarships or whatever), but they're heavily outnumbered by those whose parents are pulling down 300k+. as for the international students, it's usually a pretty short list: china, south korea, parents are u.s. nationals living abroad or they're a foreign citizen but have lived in the states for the past 8 years. it's definitely getting better, but these places are still a lot more homogeneous than you people give them credit for.</p>

<p>having said all that, you're definitely right that it's a lot more diverse than the next local high school where almost all the kids will be of nearly identical ethnic, economic and geographic backgrounds (the latter by definition).</p>

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<p>Well...it's definitely more diverse for our son. Our public high school is 99% caucasian (like our state). All middle and upper middle class. Zero diversity.</p>

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<p>lbftw - "although often people will fudge the truth about this to get financial aid, scholarships or whatever"</p>

<p>Dont the school check up on the facts if you try and fake something. Are there repercussions for that type of thing?</p>

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<p>ibftw, do you really think parents can "fudge" the truth about fa? My parents had to provide their tax returns, and listed their debts--so I don't know how they could lie. Plus, I don't think most adults want to be seen as being "poor" by the school their child will be attending. My mom is embarrassed that we have to ask for FA for me--the LAST thing she would do is LIE and say we make even less money than we do! I don't think most parents lie ("fudge")about stuff like this, but maybe I'm wrong....where are you getting your facts from ibftw?</p>

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<p>I agree with you KitKatBar, my mom wouldn't and couldn't lie about FA. She is embarressed as well to say she's poor so why would she say she needs more charity? Don't you think thats embarressing to have to ask for? She also couldn't becuase like KitKatBar my mom had to provide her taxes, i don't know how she would lie on her taxes. I would like to know where you are getting this information from because I doubt anyone does unless you did.</p>

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<p>Girls, it is definitely not "poor" to require fa for a $40,000/year high school! Being able to afford that is not the norm. Your parents should not feel at all embarassed, and I find it hard to believe that they do. It is unrealistic to think that most people could afford anywhere near this. FA is not "charity"; these schools have endowments especially for this purpose.
As far as lying on taxes....well, I guess lots of people do and some (not all) get caught.</p>