The Puzzle: Blog

Hearing live music often makes me tear up, and when it is performed by students the feeling is all the more intense. I wasn’t expecting the 9AM opening act at the EMA conference to have that effect on me, but somehow the band Beautiful Stranger from the Walnut Hill School for the Arts made me cry with their rendition of Queen’s “Don’t Stop Me Now”. While I am quite sure we’ll see those two lead singers someday on a much bigger stage, they managed to get a crowd of middle-aged, coffee-deprived conference-goers up on their feet. “I feel alive, and the world, I’ll turn it inside out.” They certainly made me feel alive, and having a shared, communal feeling is one of the reasons I love being in education. Seeing young people creating something transportive reminds me that being awed by other humans’ accomplishments is one of life's great joys, and best experienced in person.

Now that I am working for schools rather than in one, I find myself missing these almost daily moments of in-person joy. I wonder how boarding schools specifically demonstrate that in these fractured times truly living in community is a gift for their students. Now is a compelling time to assert that attending boarding school is exactly the antidote to the loneliness and isolation that are so prevalent in adolescence. It makes me wonder, is boarding school more like the “real world” than ever before?

Much has been written and represented of the original intent of boarding schools. They were set up to educate the children of the elite and to extract them from the “real world” so that they might be raised among their own social class and brought into the norms and culture of power and privilege. This troubling legacy is undeniable. However, as modern boarding schools continue to evolve and reimagine themselves, there is an argument to be made that they are now creating an educational experience that delivers an antidote to life lived on-line.

Jonathan Haidt’s book, “The Anxious Generation,” and his related article in The Atlantic makes the case for limiting the impacts of smartphones and social media on young people.   He presents solid recommendations for addressing this, but it was his fourth “norm,” or recommendation for students, that I found particularly compelling: “More independence, free play, and responsibility in the real world.”

Haidt describes the elements that constitute life in the real world.  These include interactions that are “embodied, meaning that we use our hands and facial expressions to communicate, and we learn to respond to the body language of others.” The contrast to this is on-line, where we communicate with only language.  In addition, Haidt describes real world interactions as “synchronous….and primarily involve one‐to‐one communication.” Finally, and particularly noteworthy for boarding schools, these interactions “usually take place within communities that have a high bar for entry and exit, so people are strongly motivated to invest in relationships and repair rifts when they happen.”

It strikes me that the case for boarding might now be flipped on its head, and a student in a boarding environment is more likely to experience the elements of real life that are critical to the development of qualities such as empathy, collaboration and commitment. Additionally, they are also gaining the benefits traditionally associated with a college liberal arts education. Surrounded by peers from across the globe, boarding students live with and learn from people with a wide variety of world views and become flexible in their own thinking as a result.

Examples abound of boarding schools designing environments to foster these opportunities. Susan Baldridge, Executive Director of The Association of Boarding Schools (TABS) sees a strong payoff for schools that invest in this design work commenting, “The value proposition for boarding schools is the ability to thoughtfully design a 24/7 wrap around environment in a way that optimizes learning and responds to the challenges of the cultural moment.”  Schools do this in a variety of ways including through co-curricular programs, innovation centers, internship and work opportunities, and student-run service-learning programs.

Sometimes that value is the result of simple policy and practices that help to support and promote a culture that a school is looking to create and sustain. On a recent visit to a boarding school in the TABS membership, Baldridge was struck by the role that students play in encouraging the spirit of connection and discouraging the use of cell phones on campus. She saw a senior approaching a 9th grader who was walking head down on the phone and asked, “How am I going to get to know you with your nose in that phone?”

Some schools, such as Midland School in Los Olivos, California, have built a culture with no phones at all. However, the lack of phones isn’t the only way in which they create community. Director of Admission Cierra Rickman shared that developing a sense of purpose and meaning – being needed – was essential to the growth and development of their students. The school famously employs no housekeeping staff and only three in the kitchen. “All of the cleaning is done by students. Seniors are job heads, and they teach the others. The dish house is run by the underclassmen who are trained by the seniors.”  She continued, “The jobs program helps students be part of something bigger than themselves. They can’t let the community down, and they take that with them after Midland.”

Those same seniors are given opportunities to practice and demonstrate interpersonal commitment through their work in onboarding new students and acting as leaders in the dorm. Rickman said that at Midland, “Empathy and trust go hand and hand. Younger students trust their relationships with the senior prefects as someone you can go to for any issue. At the same time, seniors see themselves in the younger students and find purpose in knowing I can help others through this.”

What places like Midland School demonstrate is that there is opportunity for education beyond “schooling.”  So much of what is learned in boarding school happens outside of the classroom.  Following up on an important study done several years ago called “The Truth about Boarding,” Baldridge is looking forward to sharing a new study from TABS quantifying many of the positive outcomes from a boarding education with fresh data. In this new study, boarding school students reported that their school better prepared them to resolve conflicts and show empathy and open-mindedness than did their peers from day schools. Of particular note is that these benefits accrue to both day and boarding students in a boarding school. It seems that the features designed to optimize the boarding experience benefit day students as well.

In fact, the very existence of boarding school structures, with shared meals (often in technology-free dining halls), wide-ranging dorm conversations, and time spent with residential faculty is in sharp contrast to the lives that students experience in day schools. Jonathan Haidt quantified the dramatic change in time spent in the company of peers: “By 2019, young people’s time with friends had dropped to just 67 minutes a day.” Given that trend, it is hard not to imagine a world in boarding schools where students are given back the gift of time spent in the company of others, without the intrusion of technology constantly pulling away their focus would be a compelling option for families wanting their children to experience the real world.

On a recent Harvard Thinking podcast (Taking the Phones out of School, September 25, 2024) St. Andrews Head of School Joy McGrath reflected on the purpose of their intentionally designed environment: “Our values, as you say, are, first of all, that education is to foster independence. If we’re going to have those developmental opportunities for independence, we have to have those opportunities to play, to form good social relationships, to interact in person, to study, to sleep, to do those things.”

While he doesn’t address boarding schools directly,  the scholar and futurist Zachary Stein, in his recent compilation of essays entitled “Education in a Time Between Worlds” is imagining an education of the future where “We need to go down and into a more relational reality, and deeper images of personhood. This kind of maturation shows up as increased collaborative capacity, including radical empathy, profound trust, and interpersonal commitment.” He projects a future school that is deeply rooted in a return to simplicity, something that was echoed by TABS’ Susan Baldridge, saying, “What was retro is now contemporary.” She applauds how purposeful boarding schools are about leveraging this opportunity.

In a world that seems to need more opportunities to celebrate our collective humanity and revel in our differences, it seems that boarding schools may have a solution for how we can both give students an opportunity to experience the real world while preparing them for it at the same time. And hopefully they will get to experience some of those tear-inducing moments of joy along the way.

 

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