Executive Director Pete Upham shares his periodic reflections. 

August 2009

Behind the Hollywood Curtain

Boarding school mystique, imagined or not, never fails to whet the media’s appetite. Our schools represent a world apart—characterized, apparently, by cult-like rituals, secret handshakes, and brutal social exclusion—where the ethos is either improbably hedonistic or absurdly autocratic, and where honors and discipline are doled out in proportion to mommy and daddy’s bankroll.

It came as no shock, then, to find “The Code of Miss Porter’s” in a summer issue of Vanity Fair. Online, it sits beside a set of links titled “More true tales from America’s most exclusive private schools.” Hmmm. Nor was I astonished to discover a broadside criticism of one of our schools. I was a bit surprised, perhaps naively, that the writer performed her critique from the platform of a single lawsuit, the specific claims of which are never corroborated in the piece, and that she managed to casually extend her criticism to the entire universe of boarding schools—guilty, apparently, of ‘institutionalizing’ “malicious” social dynamics. 

As my 17-year old daughter might remark, “Puh-leeze.”

The other night I watched NYC Prep, a popular “reality” show that follows teenagers who by all appearances have no parents but instead materialized ex nihilo on 5th Avenue, dressed in real Prada and faux maturity. Call it Lord of the Rings for the moneyed set. And if you’ve read the erstwhile hot novel, Prep, or one of its many salacious cousins, you might surmise that our schools are bastions of not only privilege, but also thoroughgoing corruption and decadence.

Such is the depiction of independent schools—and certainly boarding schools—in today’s media environment, where one can be famous for being famous, ridiculed for being principled, and caricatured—with a savagery indeed fit for cartoons—for no reason at all. The cardinal rule? Facts be damned. Interestingly, the most charitable popular treatments can be found in works of pure fantasy (e.g. Harry Potter) or sentimentalism (e.g. Dead Poets’ Society).

Yet facts and reason ultimately do matter. For all kinds of reasons—most notably, ignorance of the facts—I am in no position to address the merits of the Miss Porter’s case. I do know that it is a genuinely heartrending day whenever a student is sent home from one of our schools. In my experience, boarding school leaders do not make these decisions casually; they do so after very careful reflection, and they follow thoughtful policies and practices that afford sensitive consideration to both the individual and the community itself. A dismissal is sad. But it is equally sad— and worse, unjust— to see good students, good educators, and even good values dismissed by the media, day after day, with much less care.

As a middle class kid who attended boarding school on scholarship, and later as a teacher, dorm parent, and administrator, I learned first-hand that boarding schools pay a compliment to their students by expecting a lot. The end result is not impersonal stoicism; it’s growth, spirit, and a willingness to take thoughtful risks. Regrettably, we see evidence all around of the failure of education that does not expect enough: passivity, low tolerance for setbacks, lack of joy, and failure to mature. By expecting a lot from all of the kids, not some—regardless of class, background, or race—boarding schools model both excellence and, counterintuitive as it may seem, egalitarianism.

Far from cold-blooded meritocracies or hedge-fund-fed free-for-alls, the boarding schools I know are eminently humane places that institutionalize not malice, but support, individual attention, self-respect, and responsibility to others. That’s why research results, after adjusting to eliminate the effects of parent income and education, show that boarding school graduates not only earn graduate degrees at much higher rates than their peers and advance more quickly in their careers, but also are more philanthropic and more involved in their communities. It’s also why boarding school graduates—of various ages and stations in life—report outstanding satisfaction with their high school experience.

Are boarding schools perfect? Of course not. They are human institutions, after all. But by and large, they are organized according to tested principles, committed to noble ends, and peopled by some of the finest and most dedicated educators on the planet.

Boarding schools, with their history of graduating people as remarkable for their independence as their achievement, are the antithesis of “cults.” They’re communities. And the purported “code” that journalists long to decipher, for all of the cheap intrigue such language evokes, vanishes to reveal something far more real. A culture.

Until next time, Pete