Boarding Schools

[rachelmanija]

This week iknowcommawrite, osprey-archer, and littlerhymes all posted on Malory Towers, one of Enid Blyton's boarding school series. (scioscribe also posted on Enid Blyton and naked tennis.)

Poll #21998

Open to: Registered Users, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 72

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The best part of boarding school is...

View Answers

Midnight feasts
33 (47.8%)

Sports
2 (2.9%)

An ocean swimming pool
18 (26.1%)

Pranks
7 (10.1%)

Spanking and caning
4 (5.8%)

Getting a good education
8 (11.6%)

Everyone is a girl
28 (40.6%)

Everyone is a boy
9 (13.0%)

Magic
25 (36.2%)

Something else which I will explain in comments
6 (8.7%)

My favorite non-magical boarding school is...

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Malory Towers
17 (32.7%)

St. Clare's
6 (11.5%)

The Chalet School
12 (23.1%)

Rugby School
0 (0.0%)

Kingscote
8 (15.4%)

Another which I will name in comments
14 (26.9%)

My favorite magical boarding school is...

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Hogwarts
34 (57.6%)

Roke
11 (18.6%)

Brakebills
10 (16.9%)

Eleanor West's Home for Wayward Children
6 (10.2%)

Vampire Academy
1 (1.7%)

Some other which I will name in comments
10 (16.9%)

The Worst Ever Boarding School is...

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The one in Jane Eyre
40 (70.2%)

The one in Skin Hunger
5 (8.8%)

The one in Prep
4 (7.0%)

Some other which I will name in comments
8 (14.0%)

Comments

[liv]

Worst boarding school: the one in Lord of the Flies, which admittedly is mostly in the background rather than on the page. Failing that, the Fulcrum in the Broken Earth trilogy, or possibly the Enders Game Battle School.

[rachelmanija]

I didn't know Broken Earth had a boarding school. What's so awful about it?

[sartorias]

Favorite thing, social interaction, though pranks is up there.

Wrykyn (favorite school, thanks to Wodehouse), or else the school in Antonia Fraser

L.T. Meade was the writer who was writing girls' school stories while girls' schools were being invented. So the schools she writes about are radically different.

[rachelmanija]

Kingscote is Antonia Fraser's school.

What are Meade's schools like?

[scioscribe]

The school in Prep is sort of unpleasantly claustrophobic in its privilege, but I do have a soft spot for the neurotically granular look at its social interactions. It's probably uncomfortably close to what I was like internally as a teenager, though hopefully I didn't come across that way.

It's not a traditional school story, but I still love the intensity and f/f potential of Frost in May. Plus, the Convent of Five Wounds is a great school name.

[cyphomandra]

I read Frost in May for the first time when I was young and obsessed with fictional boarding schools, and although I loved it it made me appreciate the need for an outside world! I didn’t like the sequels as much.

[larryhammer]

Angela Brazil, a founder of the genre, rarely repeated her setting, but every boarding school I read, I can't help but think "that's almost as good as one of Brazil's".

Favorite magical boarding school is Greenlaw from A College of Magics.

[landofnowhere]

Oh, yeah, that's a good one!

[musesfool]

I haven't read most of these books so I can't comment, but I do love St. Hadrian's in the DC comicsverse, because it is an all girls boarding school that is really a school for training high school girls as ASSASSINS.

[rachelmanija]

NICE.

[st_aurafina]

I quite liked the Trebizon books, they were like Enid Blyton but a bit more contemporary. There were boyfriends, I think? Someone had a period one time even?

But seriously, Clarissa/Bill forever. <3 (And all those pony books that were boarding school adjacent - like girls run a stable that caters to the local boarding school, girls go off to pony club camp for the summer and it's got a boarding school vibe? So good.)

[rmc28]

I was going to come here and recommend Trebizon by Anne Digby. They were set more 1980s, there's a nearby boys school and there's definitely boyfriends and teen-appropriate romance. The series protagonist isn't Brilliant At Everything but is definitely brilliant in a couple of areas, and has to make a couple of difficult decisions about her school career as she gets older.

Also they are in Cornwall with swimming in the sea and surfing.

[ursula]

You left out Miss Minchin's School for Girls from A Little Princess, as well as the school in Witch Week.

[rachelmanija]

Oh, yes, both classics. Worms in custard!

[cyphomandra]

My favourite thing about boarding school stories is character interaction/development, plus the possibility of totally bizarre plot developments. I love Antonia Forest’s Kingscote for the former, but I have a soft spot for books with the latter - St Brenda’s Headache (Anne Saunders) has a girl who has Taken the Blame for another character and is punished/misjudged for it, plus bonus amnesia, robbery and blackmail, and there’s a boys boarding school that I like a lot (unfortunately it’s called Feversham’s Fag and thus joins a number of fantasy novels with rather busty covers in the category of books I can’t read on public transport). I also read one called Hoax of a Lifetime, which added drugging, kidnapping, threatening characters with a red hot poker and actually beating them with cricket bats (!) to liven up the plot.

[rachelmanija]

I cannot find Forest's books anywhere, not even on pirate sites. Alas.

[melannen]

1. according to grade school me, roommates. and never having to drive anywhere. including the library.

2. the one from "Dear Mom, Get Me Out Of Here" but nobody's heard of it, so I fall back on MacDonald Hall.

3. Wizatds' Hall. (Or maybe Casterbrook.) Roke is up there, though.

4. The Xavier School.

[osprey_archer]

MacDonald Hall ftw! Did you know they've made movies based on the books? They are not quiiiiiiite as perfect as the books, but they're doing their best.

[nyctanthes]

Worst ever boarding school: the one in Down a Dark Hall, by Lois Duncan. Prep is a runner up.

To take this survey way too literally.....Having been to boarding school...I'm not sure there is a "best" non-magical boarding school. :P But the best part is certainly - beyond the obvious, the education - the chance to be free of parents and to be with your friends, 24-7.

OTOH, it's high school. Who likes high school? That's why I voted for Brakebills. It's magical college/graduate school. Totally different animal.

[mildred_of_midgard]

I was trying to decide if I would rather attend Jane Eyre's boarding school or Hogwarts (seriously, Hogwarts is the very epitome of a Crapsaccharine World), but yes, Down a Dark Hall takes the cake of the ones I'm familiar with. You *might* come out of the other two with your life and sanity intact.

[duskpeterson]

Favorite boarding school: Sherborne, where Evelyn Waugh would have gone if his older brother Alec hadn't been thrown out for a love affair with a fellow student. Alec Waugh promptly wrote a novel scourging the school, "The Loom of Youth."

Best part about boarding schools: romantic friendships.

[hannah]

Xavier's School for Gifted Youngsters qualifies for both a magical and non-magical boarding school, so it gets my vote.

[rachelmanija]

Best or worst? ;)

[flamebyrd]

I loved boarding school stories as a child, and as an adult who was mostly reading Harry Potter for the boarding school story nostalgia (with bonus magic!) I quickly lost interest when it stopped being that. (Although, in tone, early Harry Potter was more Dahl than Blyton.)

My parents had both been to boarding school, and I distinctly remember my mother telling me, in resigned tones, that it wasn't really like Malory Towers.

[rachelmanija]

Hahahaha.

[minoanmiss]

Ah, boarding school. I remember reading about boarding schools while I was attending boarding school. Mine didn't have nearly as much buggery as several of the ones I read about, though. At least, if it did I didn't know about it.

I have a soft spot for the Heralds' and Bard' schools in the Valdemar books, and Harper Hall on Pern. At least, I did when younger.

[rachelmanija]

Oh, yes, Harper Hall!

[queenbookwench]

Macdonald Hall & Miss Scrimmage’s are among my favorite fictional boarding schools, and I’m a little bit surprised that CS Lewis’s Experiment House (where Eustace and Jill from the Narnia books go) didn’t get a mention among the worst.

Though I strongly suspect now that that’s meant to be a parody of A.S. Neill’s Summerhill, which irritates me rather.

[conuly]

You know, it probably is. It's the only fictional Summerhill I don't like!

[lilacsigil]

My school was a boarding school, though when I was there only about 10% of the students actually boarded and the rest of us only stayed over at the boarding house when we had after-school activities - it was a rural school, so most students had daily bus trips of 50-90km each way, meaning that if you wanted to do anything after school, you had to stay there overnight. It was really, really dull and I never made one close romantic friendship but I'm going to blame the presence of boys for that!

[conuly]

Best fictional boarding school? Any of the ones that are based on Summerhill. I don't know if I'd actually like to have gone to the real school, but the fictional ones based off of it (often by writers who attended that or a similar school) are great. There's one in Back Home and another in The Dragonfly Pool, both of which relate what must have been a very common complaint at school meetings at the real school - the staff mention that, once again, the railroad has complained that passengers don't like seeing the students skinnydipping, and the children retort that they should tell their passengers not to look, then, which I think about sums up the schools themselves!

The school the protagonist spends a lot of time in in Back Home is definitely a depressing one, though. No abuse, but....

[cyphomandra]

I love The Dragonfly Pool (and much of Ibbotson's other books) and am also fond of Summerhill - have you read Enid Blyton's Naughtiest Girl books, where Whyteleafe is her version of it?

[zeborah]

I almost ticked Malory Towers as favourite but the I remembered the Chalet School makes everyone speak English/French/German alternate days of the week (I think Sunday you can speak what you like) so then in all honesty I had to tick "good education" as a best part.

I am such the language nerd.

[vass]

That's the same reason I ticked the Chalet School.

[alias_sqbr]

*votes for Saint Trinian's*

I went to a moderately snooty girl's school with a boarding school, though I was one the majority of kids who didn't board. The romantic gloss of boarding schools and all girl schools rather wore off for me after that, though adding magic and/or actual f/f helps (two things my highschool life was sadly missing in).

[littlerhymes]

Diana Wynne Jones's Witch Week must be the best book about the worst magical boarding school.

I am still working my way through Malory Towers but I'm nearly done and after that - St Clares!!!

[rachelmanija]

CANNOT WAIT.

[vass]

My favourite[*] magical residential college (i.e. not a boarding school as such) is Blackstock from pameladean's Tam Lin. I figure it counts as magical because there are magical things happening there even though arguably Blackstock is not itself magical it's just occupied by Medeous's court, who are.

If it has to be a boarding school, it'd either be page training in Tamora Pierce's Tortall books, or the Heraldic Collegium in Mercedes Lackey's Valdemar.

Or, no, wait, the Think Tank in Brian Caswell's A Cage Of Butterflies. Which is a special residential program for profoundly gifted adolescents in which they get to pursue their interests while being studied by scientists, and secretly this is a cover for how there is a second, younger group of students there who appear to the world to be nonverbal autistics, and are actually supergenius psychics. The ordinary genius teens find out about the supergenius psychic preteens because they start making psychic contact with them in their dreams and ask for their help against their scientist captors. The school is a complete shitshow and all the teenagers are laconically cynical about it in a very Australian way even before they find out that they're a front for research into testing tiny psychic geniuses to destruction. The found family trope is strong with this one.

Favourite[*] non-magical boarding school, not in terms of "I would like to go there" or "I like what they're doing" but as a compelling setting and narrative: Amy Efaw's Battle Dress. (Okay, that's a residential college too, it's West Point.)

[* standard caveat here that I hate ranking things by favourites and am certain I've forgotten something or done it wrong so let's just say it is *a* member of the category that I like.]

The best part of boarding school in real life would have been not living with my parents, and the worst part would have been being with my peers full time. :/

Your categories for the "best part" question are good ones, and a nice taxonomy of the different sorts of boarding school story and why they appeal, but I think that taxonomy bears further exploration.

Here's what I've got:

Student culture: Midnight feasts, Pranks. Other things in this category too? (I'm counting "student culture" here as meaning the elements that the students come up with on their own without the knowledge or participation of teachers or parents. So house rivalry would not go here, and neither would the parlour games the Chalet School girls play at their teachers' instruction.)

Social Competition/Recreation/Performance (Sports, performing arts school books, house rivalry.) Like the previous category, but more about organised/institutional/supervised fun and excitement, as opposed to secret kid stuff.

Special focus: (Magic fits here. Getting a good education might too.) The students are at the boarding school to learn some special skill or train some special ability or accomplish some important task. It could be learning to control psychic powers or training as a paramilitary (or both, hi X-Men!) but it could as easily be a hockey academy or a ballet school. Whatever it is, the focus is intense and the rivalry, if any, has a life-or-death edge that the previous category lacks, and the kids are in some ways a lot older for their age because they're so goal-oriented, but in other ways still just kids.

Specific location: an ocean swimming pool, or the school is in Switzerland, or the school is in spaaaaace. The where of the setting is important to this one.

Idfic and tropes, including kinky tropes: spanking and caning, obviously, but also really intense h/c and fealty and crushes. Single sex education might fit here too, not as a kink but as an id thing. Also that nobody-likes-me plot where everyone else hates the character for good reason and they have a good long wallow in it - what's called lemon chicken in SGA fandom (in British boarding school stories this usually includes being sent to Coventry. There is an entire Enid Blyton boarding school book about this: The Naughtiest Girl in the School, in which the protagonist doesn't want to be sent away to school and deliberately tries to get expelled, making herself deservedly unpopular in the process and then realises she wants to stay but now no one likes or trusts her because of the way she's been behaving.)

[rachelmanija]

I love this taxonomy.

[davidgillon]

Favourite Magical Boarding School: Lackey's Heralds school.

Worst Ever Boarding School: Eton, clearly!

[frith_in_thorns]

Cackle's Academy in The Worst Witch!! I liked the books when I was little, and I really adore the new CBBC version currently airing. (Mildred Hubble, the main character, is the same actress who is Lady Lynanna Mormont in GoT.) It's so sweet, and all the plots work so well in child-logic. Miss Cackle and Miss Hardbroom are most definitely married. The arc plot of season 2 was an unreasonable parent-governor kicking off and summoning Magical OFSTED, which as a teacher I definitely appreciated.

[frith_in_thorns]

Also I went to a tiny boarding school as a day girl. I loved it so much. It was one which unusually built its reputation on serving both high achievers AND girls with dyslexia/mild learning difficulties -- as an undiagnosed autistic teenager it was exactly the right environment for me. (I didn't have *so* many friends, just a couple of very strong ones and then the rest of my class I barely understood, but I loved all my teachers so much. And I still miss the woodwork studio deeply.)

[karalee]

I greatly enjoyed Macdonald Hall (Bruno and Boots). YA, boys' school, enormous amounts of hijinks. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macdonald_Hall

As noted, there was also a girls' boarding school in the series, which was just as rambunctious, although not the center of the series.

[rachelmanija]

Oh, me too! I forgot about those.

[dorotheian]

I thought I was the only person in the world who mistakenly read Skin Hunger. O_O My mistake. It's a book that I have...actively tried to scrub from my memory.... I desperately wanted to have a conversation about it when I first read it, but it's not exactly a book you want to bring up in polite company or ask your friend to read in order to compare notes. Not worth inflicting that kind of trauma. ...This was before I did any online blogging, of course.

I am inclined to agree that my favorite magical school is the one in A College of Magics. Or maybe the school in Tamora Pierce's A Circle of Magic, though it ends up being more of a mentoring / tutoring situation? I guess I like the adult setting and the mindset of scholars which seems more similar to magical grad school than elementary, and in the process there is a lot of worldbuilding tidbits being leaked by passionate people arguing for one reason or another.

Not exactly a boarding school per se, and neither the worst nor the best, but Bloor's Academy in Charlie Bone left a very strong impression. It is Awful, yet tolerable, and a decent education may be had, aside from incessant scheming from the family that runs the school.

Brief glimpses into boarding schools for the blind or the deaf, such as the one mentioned in Beverly Butler's "Light a Single Candle" or its sequel, were very interesting and enlightening to me. If I remember correctly, the character in question did not like the school very much herself, but she saw the value in it and why her fellow students could appreciate it.

Oh! And I totally forgot, but I think my favorite non-magical boarding school would have to be the super spy girl's school Gallagher Academy in I'd Tell You I Love You But Then I'd Have to Kill You, and its rival boy spy school in later books.