The absolute first thing that made no sense about boarding school was that I went when I was NINE years old. NINE! I look at nine year olds now and they are BABIES. I felt “grown up” enough to g though. When I left 3 years later (because I was always sick), I begged to stay.
Now, looking back at it, I’m like what the hell? So many things about boarding school made no sense.
Why did we have to wake up so early?
In the “real” world, school is so early because parents go to work and school time needs to align with work time. In a “fake” world in the middle of nowhere, where the teachers had houses in the school, we shouldn’t have had to wake up at the crack of dawn. We used to start class before 8 and have two classes BEFORE breakfast?! What was the need for that?
Why were our showers cold?
I honestly think this is a violation of some kind of children's rights. We were in a village that was cold at nights and mornings and we used to wake up and have freezing showers. Why couldn’t we have hot water? People used to do really dangerous things like pour water over a hot iron, just to get hot water. It’s kind of amazing that we made it out alive.
Why didn’t we always have running water?
Why was “fetching water” a part of the boarding school experience? Why couldn’t we just always have water? If you’re responsible for 600 students, running water is like the bare minimum, I would imagine. It’s unbelievable to me now that we didn’t always have water.
Why were chores punishment?
I remember one time when like a lot of us had to wash gutters as punishment. Can’t even remember what we were being punished for but isn’t it someone’s job to wash gutters? Why on earth are we doing this as a punishment? Why did we ever cut grass? What was all this supposed to be teaching us?
I think ultimately, there was this pretence that we were somehow gathering life lessons in these harsh things, when in reality, there were much better ways to teach these things.
I loved boarding school though and there were way more good things than bad things and I still remember how gutted I was that I had to leave.
What was your boarding school experience like?