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Bullying, girls and the darker side of boarding school
By ella | August 30, 2007
In our ongoing quest to find a suitable school option for Harry I’ve been looking at private schools.
Even before my children were born I vowed they would never be sent to boarding school after my own educational experience so it seems ridiculous that I am even considering sending Harry to a private school. But he would be a day pupil, not a boarder, and he would be (relatively) close by. It wouldn’t be three months before I see him again whenever I drop him off.
The facilities in these schools are, without doubt, far superior to anything our village school provides and far superior to anything I can provide by homeschooling. A cramped school with a tiny playground and a small field down the road for limited sports are replaced by schools with spacious classrooms, nine-hole golf courses, indoor pools and fully-equipped gymnasiums. Large classes of children of all abilities are replaced by small groups of children of above-average intelligence streamed according to ability. The education he would receive would be excellent. He wouldn’t miss days of homeschooling whenever I am sick or busy with a new baby or have things to do.
But it all leaves me feeling a little uneasy and it’s not simply because I disagree with the idea of a ‘privileged’ education (although quite where that leaves me over homeschooling - where he gets possibly the best education, but there are few facilities, and of course no school fees - I don’t know). I can’t help but see behind the scenes because that’s what I’m really there to look at:
- the way the children seem like model citizens but when they think you’ve gone they revert to feral animals (as witnessed at one school much to the chagrin of the headmaster).
- the way that discipline is often heavy-handed - not of the corporal punishment type anymore but heavy on humiliation.
- the need for some teachers to treat children like they are in basic army training: I remember a male sports teacher shouting to a group of sixth form girls in my school ‘Christ it smells in here. Which one of you has a kipper up your c*nt?’ Or being told as bedtime beckoned ‘hit the showers girls: deal with those nits, pits and slits.’
- the way that newbies are used as slaves: among a whole list of chores we had to do, we had to wait in line for an hour every evening to get dorm-mates their hot water bottles and hot chocolate (when I got back to our dormitory maybe I should have thrown it at them), we had to sniff the armpits of senior girls clothes to determine whether they needed to go in the laundry and we would have to run errands, often after we had gone to bed. (Although this was all at my first senior school. My next school didn’t treat newbies quite so nastily.)
- but mostly, the way that so much of a school experience is defined by what happens outside the classroom: boarding school life is structured but because the day is longer there is more time for trouble than at a state-run school. At my prep school (ages 7-11) I wouldn’t have believed that boys really had their heads flushed in the toilets until I went there and as we lined up for mealtimes in a long corridor you would see a boy come out of the boys’ toilets at the top of the corridor having just had that done to him. The teachers would go mad trying to find out the perpetrators and the boy would be further punished for not saying. Having said that, a boy came home from our local village school with small blood marks all over the back of his white shirt. It transpired that some boys had cornered him in the toilets and stuck drawing pins in his back. So yes, it happens at all schools but there is much more ‘downtime’ at private schools when the children are free to play with each other unsupervised.
Much of what happens outside the classroom exacerbates the survival of the fittest theory. At secondary school (high school) I was bullied terribly for a year until my parents removed me. After a year at my new school without problem the upper fifth girls in my house suddenly turned on me and my friend Amelia. They refused to talk to us, humiliated us at every opportunity, played practical jokes and excluded us from everything. For weeks. We had no idea why. On the last day of term Georgina, the ringleader, passed me on the stairs and made some sarcastic comment about my parents not turning up to pick me up (they were late). After weeks on the receiving end of her nastiness I completely lost it with her. I didn’t hit her - which I probably should have done, stupid cow - but I screamed and screamed at her.
When I arrived back at the beginning of the following term all six of us were in the same dormitory together. But over the first few days it was clear that I was gradually being allowed back into the ‘circle’, presumably because of my outburst at the end of the previous term. Unfortunately Amelia was not and I had a choice to make: stand up for my friend and remain excluded in the house or join the bullies and become excluded in the classroom (because Amelia and I were the only ones in our class from our house). I chose to be friends with the other four because I could not stand to be excluded any more.
It is a decision that I regret to this day.
Life became so unbearable for Amelia that she was forced to change boarding houses - so rare, she was the only girl ever to have done so in the history of the school - and was subsequently unable to be made Head of House the next year (crucially important on a school leaver’s resume) because she was new to her house. Life returned to normal for me. Georgina became Head of our House. When I was accepted back into the fold Georgina told me that the reason she had stopped talking to Amelia and me was because while waiting to sit down for dinner one evening we had rolled our eyes at each other and Georgina knew that we were rolling our eyes at her. When she told me I felt like I had been kicked in the stomach: weeks and weeks of misery because of an action I couldn’t even recall and was certain had been misunderstood because I just wouldn’t have done that.
What doesn’t kill us makes us stronger, right? Bullied or bully? I’m not proud of what I did and I wish there had been an alternative. The rest of my school years were uneventful but I’ve had trouble forming female friendships ever since. At University my friends were entirely men and it’s only since I’ve met some fantastic mothers that I’ve bothered with female friendships. Even now I struggle with how cruel women can sometimes be to each other. And how unnecessary it is. And I will bail out of a friendship at the first sign of trouble.
Of course I have sons not daughters but bullying still happens between boys, usually the more physical variety. A friend of mine had his head slammed in his locker door until he passed out. He was bullied, violently, for nearly a year before his parents believed it was more than just ‘boys being boys’ and that their son needed to ‘toughen up because that’s what real life is like’ and took him out of his school.
I guess these things happen in all schools and of course not all children are bullied or bullies. I suppose you hope that you prepare your children enough to deal with it if it happens to them. When I took Harry out of school last year the first thing I did was start teaching him how to deal with bullies because we thought he’d be going straight back to another school somewhere. He’s a much more confident boy now, physically stronger, more confident socially and more mature. I’m pretty sure he could deal with minor ‘boys will be boys’ stuff. But the private schools that look so good on paper and when you are shown around them have a darker side, one I and many of my friends know first hand, and I don’t know if I can bring myself to let Harry experience it. He may need to ‘toughen up because real life is hard’, but not yet.
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Read More:
- Bullying and the cruelty children can bestow on each other
- Home educating
- How to stop bullying
- Bullying at school
- Why homeschooling did and didn’t work for us
Categories: Homeschooling and School, In the Past
‘toughen up because real life is hard’ - can I just stress the fact that a schoolyard is nowhere close to what “real life” is like? The attitude of “toughening up” towards bullying is something that is unique to schools. As adults, if we experience half of what children experience daily at school, we don’t “toughen up”, we file assault charges. Now, I’m a big advocate of kids “toughening up” to life, but I prefer they do it in the real world rather than the artificial microcosm that is school.
Anyway, I know you’re having a tough time with everything at the moment, but don’t be too hard on yourself. You’re achieveing more than you know. Harry’s happiness and confidence is evidence of that.
I agree, Frally, and which is why I think there is no excuse for schools not to have to zero-tolerance policy towards bullying. And which is why I took my son out of school when his headteacher implied that the form of bullying he was on the receiving end of was ‘normal playground rough and tumble’. It’s not that I want to over-protect my son because I know that won’t do him any favors in the long run but learning about ‘life’ the hard way in school or in the school playground is not what I have in mind for any of my children.
But, the attitude of toughening up in preparation for real life is the normal attitude at school (even though, as you say, we would file assault charges as adults) and if a school thinks that that is okay I don’t know how we as parents challenge it, except for not allowing our children to attend there.
Georgina sounds like a psycho.
I would never send my children to boarding school because you don’t have that interaction at the end of the day to find out if something is going on and stop it. Your story just confirms that and I think you are right not to send Harry to private school.
Your private school experience sounds pretty horrific, worse even than my public school one. Actually, I didn’t find my school to be all that awful, though the girls were terrible to one another. It seems that’s the way it is every where.
I agree with Frally in that school is not at all a natural environment for children. It’s a bizarre little world in which you are surrounded by peers just your age and a few select adults. I’m not certain how anyone can really thrive (or mature well) in that setting.
Little children should not be made to “toughen up” because they are forced to deal with other children who have been taught that bullying is acceptable. My husband was beaten several times a week on the school bus to and from school because of his “big mouth”. He was a smart kid and knew a lot of “big” words and it got him into trouble. Then his teachers would yell at him for arriving at school with his shirts all torn and dirty and blood on his face. Nice. Needless to say, my husband is very supportive of homeschooling.
“When I took Harry out of school last year the first thing I did was start teaching him how to deal with bullies because we thought he’d be going straight back to another school somewhere. ”
My heart really goes out to you for what you have experienced.
I’d be very interested to know if you have already posted, or if you would post, about how you taught your son to deal with bullies.
Thanks for your blog.
Kristen - what happened to your husband was terrible and, sadly, I’m sure that kind of thing is not unusual.
TUA - I haven’t posted about how I taught him to deal with bullies. We read a couple of good books and I will try to find them and post about what I thought were the most effective strategies.
I think private schools turn out a certain kind of person and you also have to be a certain kind of person to survive school unscathed. I would have reservations about sendind any child of mine to a boarding school and I can totally understand why you are hesitatnt too.