The continuing evolution of boarding
YOUNG boy stares forlornly at his parents’ car driving away, a tear rolling down his cheek. He tries to chase after them but falls down and scrapes his knee. An adult (presumably the teacher) looks disinterestedly from a distance and beckons the boy to follow him into the boarding school building.
In the award-winning Bollywood movie Taare Zameen Par (reissued as Like Stars On Earth by Disney’s International DVD), the parents of eight-year-old Ishaan decide that sending him to a boarding school will make him behave better and improve academically.
Many Malaysian parents seem to share this same view of boarding schools: as a magical correctional facility for both books and behaviour. Indeed, popular media still depicts boarding schools as a place to banish the unruly who need some sense knocked into them.
Readers of J.D. Salinger’s classic Catcher in the Rye dread boarding schools as a representation of the winter of their adolescent discontent – a cold, distant place where parents threaten to send their children to if they do not measure up. Parents drop their children off in September, pick them up again in June and let the schoolmasters worry about what happens in between.
Movies such as Lindsay Anderson’s If... (1968) and books such as Enid Blyton’s The Naughtiest Girl in School begin with the main characters being sent away by their parents because the adults viewed their parenting skills as inadequate.
Kathryn Farrell, principal of UCSI Springhill, echoes this statement, “In the past, boarding schools were viewed by some people as places that parents send children to if they are too busy to care for them.”
This is not the case now. Modern boarding schools are becoming more relaxed and pleasant places for children to develop.
First few steps
How and why do parents make the decision to send a child away from home to study?
To accuse parents who send their children to boarding school of lazy parenting and neglect is not only insensitive but also misinformed. The reality is that boarding parents are very involved in the lives of their children and are committed to providing their children the best opportunities.
Far from being part-time parents, there are many ways for parents to participate in the well-being of boarders. More parents of students in boarding schools realise an improvement in terms of communication quality between parent and child: less nagging and more openness towards honestly expressing endearments and encouragement.
Boarding builds on the existing family life and injects new dynamics into the child’s development such as leadership, teamwork and a sense of the larger community.
Boarding schools provide the social and emotional bridge towards a sense of independence for children. Students who take the time to research boarding schools and attend schoolorganised Open Day events find the facilities, campus and the notion of a higher level of autonomy appealing.
The majority of parents who send their children to boarding schools do so because the children themselves wish to go. John Fancourt, the principal of Rafflesia International and Private Schools Puchong recalls refusing to follow his pilot father around the world, choosing to stay with friends at a boarding school in Australia instead.
“My wife and I both went to boarding school and loved it, which is why I did professional development in terms of pastoral care for boarding,” he says.
Although not currently managing a boarding school, Fancourt has brought his love of boarding schools with him to Rafflesia and is applying his professional pastoral care experience with his day-schoolers.
It has helped him see students as more than mere vessels of knowledge and as multi-faceted, constantly developing individuals.