Anne here. When I was a kid, I longed to go to boarding school. Partly this was because we'd moved a lot and I was fed up with making friends and then moving and having to make new ones, and then moving . . .
It was also because my siblings are a decade older than me, and by the time I was ten they'd all left home to go to college or university or to be married, and I was fed up with being the only kid at home.
But I think mainly it was the influence of writers like Enid Blyton and others, who wrote stories about girls at English boarding schools who were always having adventures and making chums and having midnight feasts and solving mysteries. All terribly jolly. My sisters had stacks of those books and I devoured them. It wasn't just girls. The books and schoolboys' annuals my brother left behind were also full of boarding school adventures for boys — usually much more thrilling than the girls' ones.
The Chalet School (by Elinor M. Brent-Dyer) sounded wonderfully exotic and exciting to me set in Austria at first, students from all over the world, swapping languages according to the day of the week, and all the usual adventures, but as well, they dealt with girls adjusting to a new life, learning to be better people and changing.
But looking back at those old stories, as well as great adventures, they're sadly full of snobbery and racism and sexism — which was a reflection of their times. Begun in the 1920's, the Chalet School was located in the Austrian Tyrol, before it was moved to Guernsey in 1939 following the rise to power of the Nazi Party, and again to Herefordshire following the Nazi invasion of the Channel Islands. It further moved to a fictional island off the coast of Wales, and finally to Switzerland.
But back then I loved the idea of those schools, and in fact, when I turned eleven there was talk at home of sending me to a boarding school. (I suspect I might have harped on the theme somewhat.) It almost became a reality — until I discovered I couldn't take my beloved dog with me. I'd been misled by a book called Exile for Annis (by Josephine Elder) where Annis was sent off to boarding school, unhappily, but soon found that all sorts of good things, including pets, were allowed. That was going to be me, I thought — and the girl on the cover even looked like me, plaits and all. <g>
But the people who ran the two boarding schools that were under consideration for me didn't appear to have such an enlightened attitude to pets, so that finished my yearning to go to boarding school.
Of course, boarding schools have been around for centuries— how many regencies have we read set partly in boarding schools for young ladies or gentlemen? I've written some myself and Mary Jo wrote a wonderful series about the Westerfield Academy, a school for boys of "good birth and bad behavior."
But they're not all jolly hockey sticks and midnight feasts. Some of them are a kind of borstal, others are posh and privileged and with some the jury is out as to which it is. Many countries have established boarding schools for the education of bright children from remote regions — according to Wikipedia, tens of millions of rural children are now educated at boarding schools in China.
And in the past countries like Canada, USA, Australia and others established boarding schools for indigenous children, the plan being to isolate them from their cultures and assimilate them into the mainstream culture. Some boarding schools were established to deal with children with psychological problems, and there are military-style schools to teach students strict discipline.
My mother went to a boarding school. A country girl, she won a scholarship to a small exclusive boarding school in Melbourne. I think she was proud to have gone there, and she did well, winning a number of academic and music prizes and being awarded dux of the school, but she never talked much about it. In later years, reading between the lines, I think the posh girls there weren't very nice to the little country scholarship girl who outdid them in everything from academic subjects to gym and music. I think it must have been a very difficult time for her, but of course, it was such an honor to go there, she could never admit it.
A friend of mine was also a scholarship girl in a large boarding school in a country town. In country Australia a lot of the wealthy graziers send their children to boarding school. My friend's family was poor, and despite the scholarship, her parents had really had to scrape together the funds to cover the remaining costs. She felt under huge pressure to do well and deserve the money that had been spent on her, but not on her siblings.
The same pressure is felt by many students from Asia, who are sent to Australia for their education. Sometimes a whole community will work to get the money to pay for the brightest student in the village to be sent overseas to study and bring honor to their community. Having little idea of what is required—living and studying in a foreign country in a foreign language with no family support—they have no idea of the stress they're putting the students under.
The Harry Potter books and movies have brought boarding schools back as a glamorous and exciting choice for those who can afford it. According to this article, there has been a one third rise in sending children to boarding schools in the last ten years, and I'm sure that's partly to do with Harry Potter's Hogwarts.
But as well, with people living more peripatetic lives these days, it makes sense to send the children to boarding school instead of moving them all the time, and perhaps ending up in a place where there aren't good educational facilities.
So the boarding school fantasy lives on. In fact there's a series by Jenny Colgan (writing as Jane Beaton) set in boarding schools, and one of the quotes say: "Just like Malory Towers for grown ups." Great selling point for all those who grew up reading boarding school stories. It's what started me off thinking about the topic.
So what about you — did you read boarding school stories when you were young? Did the Harry Potter books entrance you or not? And if you could attend a boarding school anywhere in the world, where (or when) might it be?
And wishing all you who celebrate it, a very happy and safe Thanksgiving for Thursday.