Comments on: Your Monday poll #13

By: Nate W.

Nate W. — Tue, 19 Feb 2008 21:59:23 +0000

Err… That makes it even sadder–wish you could edit your own posts…

By: Nate W.

Nate W. — Tue, 19 Feb 2008 21:58:48 +0000

Re: 29:

I used the word flaunt deliberately

That's makes it even sadder. The proper word there is flout.

By: ArielW

ArielW — Tue, 12 Feb 2008 17:07:22 +0000

hahaha, should have been “and hate to be” to start it out. ;-p

By: ArielW

ArielW — Tue, 12 Feb 2008 17:06:57 +0000

at hate to be a grammar Nazi, but it should be “If money were no object, would you send your kids to boarding school?” It’s a subjective use of the verb which means that it has to be past conditional. I never learned this about English until I studied a foreign language. I’ve learned more about English studying Spanish than I give myself credit for learning in umpteen years of English in school.

By: rbc

rbc — Tue, 12 Feb 2008 16:28:32 +0000

re: 37 I’m not sure what the answer is, but in my experience there are too many BYU acolytes who labor under the delusion that BYU is an elite school. BYU is akin to a Mormon boarding school: a great way for Mormon parents to flaunt their lack of parenting skills. (raising spiritually insecure children who might not survive a non-LDS school with their testimonies intact or come away w/ an LDS spouse.)

As to the OP, we considered enrolling our kids in an area private school-The Hill School-until we learned students had to board for at least one year during their high school years. (many out of state students board all 4-5 years.) We’re probably too selfish, but we want to maximize our time with our kids, so we passed. But we find other ways to flaunt our lack of parenting skills.

By: Megan

Megan — Tue, 12 Feb 2008 06:01:40 +0000

I know lots of people who went to boarding school (a pretty large percentage of my fellow students), and I put maybe. Any children I’d have are purely hypothetical at this point, but I don’t know that I wouldn’t consider it for high school, especially if it was the latter part of high school. Quite a few of my friends attended high school at home through their junior year and then did two years at an international school, and really that’s only leaving home a year earlier than usual. And queuno, I know what program you’re talking about, and I thought about it (until I realized that it would be stupid, since any university I planned on attending would not have accepted the transfer credits). I think my parents would have been fine with it.
I know what I got out of a public education (public education in my school district is not steller), and I know how overwhelming it was to be in classes my freshman year with people who went to some of the most fantastic boarding and prep schools in the country. Its just not anywhere close to the same caliber of education, and, aside from the obvious financial considerations, I definitely see the appeal of boarding schools.
Of course, there is always the option of living close to the kinds of schools that are the same caliber as boarding schools, but don’t actually have boarding students (like, Harvard-Westlake in LA or Horace Mann in NYC, or something like that), and barring financial considerations, I would defintely go for that.

By: ESO

ESO — Tue, 12 Feb 2008 00:53:25 +0000

I don’t mind if they MEET rich people, I said I didn’t want them to make rich friends. I know a lot of rich kids/people and generally speaking, I don’t want my kids to adopt the consumerism, self-absorption, insensitivity, and ingratitude inherent to many rich families. Or to become Republicans.

You can see I am making an outrageous generalization that is based in my actual concern, right?

My family acted as chaufer for the LDS kids (whose parents were mostly in Saudi, I think) at a boarding school in the UK. I think the kids averaged 2 weeks a year church attendance. Hard for a lot of kids to recover from that and activate themselves after HS. That would be a major hold-back for me.

That said, Boarding School is just not a part of American culture. In my husband’s place, boarding starts at age 5, if you have the money–totally normal.

I read enough Enid Blyton books to have made boarding school my childhood fantasy, but I think I could have been placated by a school with a uniform that included a plaid skirt.

By: Ray

Ray — Mon, 11 Feb 2008 22:58:25 +0000

Molly beat me to it in #31. Some of the best friends I had in college were so rich they loaned money to the Vanderbilts; some of the biggest jerks were poor kids on full needs-based scholarships (like myself).

#33 – Priceless.

By: queuno

queuno — Mon, 11 Feb 2008 20:46:46 +0000

Do LDS have the same attitudes toward non-BYU elite colleges as toward prep schools and boarding schools?

By: Melinda

Melinda — Mon, 11 Feb 2008 20:31:20 +0000

I think the issue with making rich friends would be the peer pressure to have all the same expensive gadgets that the rich friend gets. That’s just a guess, as my son has no rich friends.

Our neighbor’s teenage daughter goes to boarding school. The court said she could either go to boarding school, or to juvenile detention. I’m hoping it’s a boarding school with good security and extra guards.

I wouldn’t send my kids to boarding school because I would miss them too much.