Friday 3 July 2009
Boarding schools have changed. Residential education in the past would sometimes fuel awful tales of hardship. The boarding school of today is vastly different, with boarding houses and hostels being places of friendship and support. Boarding staff must be professional and caring in their quest to provide a “home away from home” and a warm and secure environment for their students. The happy memories of contemporary boarding life will last a life-time as will the benefits of learning how to live in community with others. Some of the best examples of excellence in boarding are now found in Australia.
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LIGHTS ON: GETTING TO THE CRUX OF LEADING AND MANAGING BOARDING HOUSES
Our 2009 conference for Leaders of Residential Communities
details on the Events Tab.
Being neither too formal so that individuality is crushed, nor too informal so that propriety is threatened, an excellent boarding school embraces those intangibles that transform a place of residence into a home. It is a place where procedures are practised with an understanding of their necessity, and routines are celebrated for their capacity to achieve those ends not always obtained through natural inclination.
The level of excellence in a boarding house can be measured in the mood of the least happy. It is found in the presence of a secure sanctuary, in the joy of belonging and in a community that brings order to a life and repair to those elements of character which nature and nurture might have conspired to neglect. It is found less in carefully crafted rules and more in unwritten habits that have been cemented into a community. An excellent boarding school is one which is happy, and happiness is seldom arrived at through the exercise of routines that deprive of dignity.
Happiness requires warmth and empathy, but does not accommodate its students within a saccharine existence of self-indulgence, for an excellent community will occasionally express its love in a compulsion to adhere to prescribed expectations. Excellence is a place where individual rights are celebrated, but not at the expense of community rights.
It is a place of balance between personal freedom, wherein is found the expression of creativity and character, and corporate duty, wherein is found the expression of proper citizenship.Excellence is when staff are chosen as much for their personal character as their professional skill. These skills must include an enjoyment of the young and an appreciation of their proclivities and passions.
The excellent boarding house encompasses within its walls a right and proper mix of private and public space, the former to honour the individual the latter to honour the group.Boarding is not a holding pen between bouts of academia, but a place of learning in its own right, an academy which teaches the skills needed for life. It evokes in its students not the awful tale of deprivation or the delicious account of cruelty, but rather, the memory of friendships and experiences which have enriched and equipped for a lifetime, and perhaps even beyond.
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