You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
This book is about boarding schools and their impact on the emotional lives of their pupils - not just the immediate impact as it occurs in childhood and adolescence but also far reaching as it extends into the thinking, attitude and behaviour of adults many years later. The author has written a compelling account inspired largely by her growing psychoanalytic practice with adults whose depressed states turn out to have derived from the consequences of their boarding school life. Out of all this, she has produced a truly exhaustive study of the nature of boarding schools, the vulnerabilities of children and the powerful emotional residues of early experience seeped in the ways of boarding school life. It is far from a rosy picture; more a tragic story of emotional blight.
The independent Schools Council (ISC) report for 2013 recorded 66,776 pupils boarding in 465 ISC schools. This constituted 13.1 per cent of total pupil numbers. ‘What is so extraordinary about the statistics is that those attending boarding schools are a minority - yet in government most of the policy makers are ex-boarders. They are also represented in all the major institutions in Britain’ (p. 4). This is an important political point, highlighting the pervasive influence of a certain kind of upbringing on the mentalities of those in leadership positions in our society: ‘The social implications of boarding school are based on a patriarchal tradition that runs like a fault line, an unseen influence, in British society. An outcome of early boarding may be that children have to learn to cut themselves off from compassion for their own predicament’ (p. 10).
The author proposes the idea of a mental phenomenon to be known as boarding school syndrome. Her intention is not to pathologize all who have attended boarding school; nor is she seeking to establish a new category of mental disorder. Rather she is wanting to alert us to the fact that there ‘is an identifiable cluster of learned behaviours and emotio