Boarding school
A boarding school is an educational institution where some or all pupils not only study, but also live, amongst their peers. The word 'boarding' in this sense means to provide food and lodging.
Many public schools in the Commonwealth of Nations and private schools in the USA are boarding schools. The amount of time one spends in boarding school varies considerably from one year to twelve or more years. Boarding school pupils may spend the majority of their childhood and adolescent life away from their parents, although pupils return home during the holidays.
Pupils may be sent to boarding schools at any ages up to eighteen.
Typical boarding school characteristics
The term boarding school often refers to classic British boarding school and many boarding schools are modeled on these.
A typical modern fee-charging boarding school has several separate residential houses, and in various streets in the neighbourhood of the school. Pupils generally need permission to go outside defined school bounds; they may be allowed to venture further at certain times.
A number of senior teaching staff are appointed as housemasters or housemistresses, each of whom takes quasi-parental responsibility for some 50 pupils resident in their house, at all times but particularly outside school hours. Each may be assisted in the domestic management of the house by a housekeeper often known as matron, and by a house tutor for academic matters, often providing staff of each gender. Nevertheless, older pupils are often unsupervised by staff, and a system of monitors or prefects gives limited authority to senior pupils.
Boarding schools in literature
Boarding schools and their surrounding settings and situations have become almost a genre in (mostly) British literature with its own identifiable conventions. (Typically, protagonists find themselves occasionally having to break school rules for honourable reasons which the reader can identify with, and might get severely punished when caught - but usually they do not embark on a total rebellion against the school as a system.)
Boarding schools and corporal punishments
Boarding schools have a reputation of enforcing a system of strict rules; stricter than those found in a family home. Traditionally this meant that pupils were subjected to various forms of punishment for the breaking of rules, including corporal punishment, the latter usually in the form of spankings, birchings, canings, strappings, etc.
See also
- More information is available at [ Wikipedia:Boarding_school ]
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