Links
Archives
Thursday, September 08, 2005
|
To leave New Orleans for a moment… “Boarding school enrollment dropped from about 42,000 in the late 1960’s to 39,000 in the last school year - even though, according to the Census Bureau, the population of 14- to 17-year olds was more than 1.5 million higher in 2004 than in 1968,” notes an op/ed writer in one of those schizy pieces that so often appear in the New York Times. (Schizy because rich Times readers like the idea of expensive exclusive schools for their kids, but the same readers demand that their paper publish regular denunciations of them. Why? I don’t know. That’s why I call it schizy.) The writer has various theories as to why boarding schools have declined in popularity; but after all there are still close to 40,000 American people in these places, and if we want to understand the nature of a university like Brown or Princeton, it’s worthwhile to understand their feeders: The self-containment of boarding schools can create terrariums of privilege in which students develop a skewed sense of money and have a hard time remembering that, in fact, it is not normal to go skiing in Switzerland just because it's March, or to receive an S.U.V. in celebration of one's 16th birthday. At, for example, Choate Rosemary Hall - one of many boarding schools starting classes this or next week - room, board and tuition for 2005-2006 is $35,360. If, as Choate's Web site explains, 27 percent of students receive financial aid, that means the other 73 percent come from families that are, by just about any standards except perhaps their own, very rich. Even when these schools hold chapel services espousing humility and service to others, it's the campus facilities - the gleaming multimillion-dollar gymnasium, say - that can send a louder message. Remember Walter Kirn’s essay about Princeton? This is the backstory. It's hard not to wonder: in a world of horrifying inequities, at what point do these lavishly maintained campuses go from enriching and bucolic to just obscene? Can a student living on such a campus be blamed if, logically working backward, she starts to think her access to such bounty must exist because she deserves it? It is this line of thought, I suspect, that gives rise to the noxious attitude of entitlement and snobbishness that is simultaneously less common than pop-culture depictions of boarding school would have you believe and also not that hard to find. |