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scioscribe also posted on Enid Blyton and naked tennis.)The best part of boarding school is...
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...
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...
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...
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%)
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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.)
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Worst Ever Boarding School: Eton, clearly!
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As noted, there was also a girls' boarding school in the series, which was just as rambunctious, although not the center of the series.
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Re: TW: all the child abuse
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Re: TW: all the child abuse
And if they're really not strong enough, then they're brainwashed from childhood to become the captors of those people, who are equally enslaved in their own way.
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here; it's not the first one, but it's not a bad place to start. Alas, the people doing reprints all seem to be luddites about having ebook versions. I believe there are unofficial ebook versions circulating but the communities I'm on that might have them also include people connected to the official reprints, so it's hard to ask!
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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.