Boarding school

A number of senior teaching staff are appointed as housemasters, housemistresses, dorm parents, prefects, or residential advisors, each of whom takes quasi-parental responsibility (in loco parentis) for anywhere from 5 to 50 students resident in their house or dormitory at all times but particularly outside school hours.

Houses may also have common rooms for television and relaxation and kitchens for snacks, and occasionally storage facilities for bicycles or other sports equipment.

Most school dormitories have an "in your room by" and a "lights out" time, depending on their age when the students are required to prepare for bed, after which no talking is permitted.

Many North American boarding schools are located in beautiful rural environments and have a combination of architectural styles that vary from modern to hundreds of years old.

The Dining Hall often serves as a central place where lessons and learning can continue between students and teachers or other faculty mentors or coaches.

[8] One example of regulations covered within the National Boarding Standards are those for the minimum floor area or living space required for each student and other aspects of basic facilities.

One observation that appears to apply globally is that a significantly larger number of boys than girls attend boarding school and for a longer span of time.

In Europe, a practice developed by early medieval times of sending boys to be taught by literate clergymen, either in monasteries or as pages in great households.

The author of the Croyland Chronicle recalls being tested on his grammar by Edward the Confessor's wife Queen Editha in the abbey cloisters as a Westminster schoolboy, in around the 1050s.

Private tuition at home remained the norm for aristocratic families, and for girls in particular, but after the 16th century, it was increasingly accepted that adolescents of any rank might best be educated collectively.

[16][17] Some states, especially Massachusetts, sponsored and subsidized semi-public boarding schools, often called "academies," to educate students from the surrounding rural areas.

[20] The market for semi-public academies narrowed in the second half of the nineteenth century as local governments began establishing free, public secondary day schools.

At these boarding schools, managed and regulated by the government, Native American students were subjected to a number of tactics to prepare them for life outside their reservation homes.

[26] In accordance with the assimilation methods used at the boarding schools, the education that the Native American children received at these institutions centered on the dominant society's construction of gender norms and ideals.

[citation needed] While the Native American children were exposed to and were likely to adopt some of the ideals set out by the whites operating these boarding schools, many resisted and rejected the gender norms that were being imposed upon them.

[citation needed] In Canada, the largest independent boarding school is Columbia International College, with an enrollment of 1,700 students from all over the world.

General schools offered "extended stay" programs (Russian: Группа продленного дня) featuring cheap meals for children and preventing them from coming home too early before parents were back from work (education in the Soviet Union was free).

The Swiss government developed a strategy of fostering private boarding schools for foreign students as a business integral to the country's economy.

[33] In India, there exists a variety of boarding schools, which are operated by both private entities and governmental bodies at the state and central levels.

[34] Significant numbers of them enter the political upper class of society or join the financial elite in fields such as international banking and venture capital.

[34][35] Boarding school establishment involves control of behavior regarding several aspects of life including what is appropriate and/or acceptable which adolescents would consider as intrusive.

[36] According to Peter W Cookson Jr (2009) the elitist tradition of preparatory boarding schools has declined due to the development of modern economy and the political rise of the liberal west coast of the United States of America.

[34][37] The distinct and hierarchical nature of socialization in boarding school culture becomes very obvious in the manner students sit together and form cliques, especially in the refectory, or dining hall.

[34][37] The rigid gender stratification and role control is displayed in the boys forming cliques on the basis of wealth and social background, and the girls overtly accepting that they would marry only for money, while choosing only rich or affluent males as boyfriends.

However, that involves spending significant parts of one's early life in what may be seen as a total institution[38] and possibly experiencing social detachment, as suggested by social-psychologist Erving Goffman.

A preparatory schoolboy, when caught off his guard, will call his mother 'Please, matron,' and always addresses any male relative or friend of the family as 'Sir', like a master.

In England, parents of the governing classes virtually lose any intimate touch with their children from about the age of eight, and any attempts on their part to insinuate home feeling into school life are resented.

[9] This view reflects a new outlook towards education and child growth in the wake of more scientific understanding of the human brain and cognitive development.

Children sent away to school at an early age suffer the sudden and often irrevocable loss of their primary attachments; for many this constitutes a significant trauma.

[47] Boarding schools and their surrounding settings and situations became in the late Victorian period a genre in British literature with its own identifiable conventions.