Education Letter: Boarding Hell
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Your support makes all the difference.I WAS interested to read Jonathan Chapple's paen of praise to boarding schools today (Your Views, 5 November). May I presume he is also in favour of better provision for adults to cope with the after-effects of boarding school life?
My first reaction to his letter was to recite a catalogue of the viciousness and selfishness that I saw for six years at my school (thankfully, little directed at me), but that would have taken too long. The life of adolescents is by nature strange and fluid; to put a groups of them together and effectively abdicate their control to other adolescents - especially those whose main ability is to ingratiate themselves with the adults nominally in charge - is bizarre at the very least.
There is not an effective safety valve against bullying because boarding school culture "gets" whoever breaks ranks on their so-called friends.
Andrew Ruddle
Weybridge, Surrey
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