On Boarding Schools
Tradition, Trauma, and Toy Trains
The other day, I passed a friend from our apartment complex. She’s also a class-mom — our kids are in the same class at one of the fancier city schools, just a five-minute drive from home.
She was mid-conversation with someone when I overheard her say that a few spots might open up for admissions in the new academic year. Some of the parents were moving their kids to The Doon School, in the foothills of Dehradun.
On my walk back to the apartment, some of the old dread of being sent off to a boarding school came rushing back.
I was never sent to boarding school. My parents were lazy that way. But the threat was real.
Boarding Schools and Me
I was a mischievous child, with perpetually busted elbows and knees — crusts of skin drying up, waiting to be opened up again. The same warning followed every time: I’d be packed off to St. Paul’s, Darjeeling as soon as admissions opened up. Apparently, only the strict routines of a boarding school could set me straight. Taare Zameen Par all the way.
Now, don’t get me wrong. I had a happy childhood — full of cousins, warm chaos, and loving parents. But in the midst of all this, every mention of St. Paul’s made me nervous. The idyllic colonial hill-town of Darjeeling, with its cute toy train and warm puff pastries at Glenary’s, sounded more like Alcatraz in wool blazers.
Years later, in my teens, I travelled to Nainital. The cab driver, as part of his sightseeing, drove us around some of the residential schools in the area. One of them was Sherwood College, nestled on a hill, surrounded by pine forests. “Amitabh Bachchan and Danny Denzongpa studied here,” the driver declared..
The campus was impressive. Sports infrastructure is always a great hook for city parents and kids raised in concrete-box schools. We walked around a bit. But for all its grandeur, the creaking wooden floors and echoing corridors gave the place a cold, eerie texture. It felt strangely cut off from the world.
Had the news of Twin Towers being brought down by hijacked planes reached them?
A few years later, I was on a road trip across Rajasthan with a friend who had studied at Mayo College. On our Ajmer stop, he took us on a campus tour. We drove past huge tracts of sports fields and courts. Nicely trimmed football grounds are a soft spot for me. Inside, arching hallways and wooden plaques bore the names of high-achieving students and alumni across decades. The corridors smelt of history and ambition. More Dead Poets Society, Less Student of the Year.
Logic of Boarding Schools
All my childhood trauma aside, there is a traditional logic to boarding schools.
Stability for migratory families: For armed forces, diplomats, or others with transferable jobs, boarding school provides continuity. A friend, an army kid once told me — “We lived from one heartbreak to another. Just when we had built up enough courage to pass a note to a crush, we’d be TCed to another cantonment”. Quite sad.
Difficult home environments: Children of households which are not conducive to healthy emotional upbringing. Broken families, separated parents, legal situations.
Lack of local access: The parents have the resources, but lack a quality school in the district or village they live in. Mayo is full of children from small towns of Rajasthan and India.
Then there are more complicated reasons:
“Better” Institutes
Boarding Schools are perceived to be “better”. They have tradition and legacy to back it up. Their remoteness also ensures that they remain unblemished by the “perverse influences of the big city”
These institutions are seen as shorthand for success. Some of these boarding schools are also feeder schools for top universities. When a college aspirant gets into Harvard, the student is likely to have a good prognosis for success in life.
So, it feels rational — even responsible — for well-meaning parents to aim for the best institute within their means.
Parental Ego and Social Capital
Modern urban parents live with an existential dread. They project unmet ambitions onto their children. They lie awake wondering: Are we doing enough for our deeply curious, once-in-a-generation prodigy?
The best school? The best tutor? The best coach?
Parents are ego-driven — like all humans. While they wish the best for their child, they also fall in love with the idea of a certain school. It’s social currency. This isn’t unique to the elite. In a small town, shifting your child from a vernacular to an English-medium school is also a flex.
This isn’t a value judgment. We’re wired to seek respect and recognition in our peer group.
But, it is also — not about education, it’s about social signaling.
Why could Boarding schools be a bad idea?
There are good reasons to send a child to boarding — stability and continuity seem to be good ones.
For the other reasons, I am not too sure.
The World Has Changed – And the Schools Haven’t
I have written about how the world is changing at a pace which is increasingly difficult to keep up with (AI and everything else). Education is ripe for change.
In my last post I had written —
The marginal cost of learning is almost coming to zero. If you have a child born today, my prediction is, she is unlikely to go to a university in the traditional form we recognize today.
The world has changed more in the past 50 years than in all of humanity preceding it. And it’s going to change more in the next 10 years, than the preceding 50.
Institutional Ossification
Parampara, Pratishtha, Anushashan anyone?
Boarding schools specialize in tradition preservation. Their majestic colonial buildings are fit enough to be UNESCO World Heritage Sites.
And that is the bug I want to call out
Old-big organizations become bureaucratic. They are slow to adapt and change. They are giant ships that can’t pivot easily. Changing a blackboard might require a constitutional amendment.
Exhibit: I went to the Doon School Computer Science Curriculum listed on their website.
Almost half of the listed tools are obsolete or irrelevant. Adobe Flash, which is listed above, for instance, was discontinued by Adobe in 2020!
Tradition, prestige, and legacy become baggage in a world that needs agility.
My hot take? These schools are preparing kids for a world that no longer exists.
Isn’t it the same for non-boarding schools?
City schools are grappling with the same issues. They are having to play catch up constantly. While schools teach MS Paint, kids are already using AI to generate their own superheroes. Most teachers complain that the children are already ahead in most technical disciplines.
Children are often ahead of the curriculum because they have direct access to learning tools at home — a key advantage city school kids have over those in boarding. Parents, focusing solely on their own child and not bound by institutional bureaucracy, can respond and adapt quickly. Change happens in real time.
Modern Learning is decentralized. Children don’t just learn at school. They learn across disciplines and media. They learn on YouTube and ChatGPT as much as they learn in classrooms.
For a child, what can be achieved at the unit of the family, can’t be achieved at the level of a slow institution.
Let’s look at homeschooling for a minute.
The number of parents choosing homeschooling — a serious commitment — has been rising steadily each year.
On the spectrum of parenting, home-schooling and boarding school sit at opposite extremes. One is high-touch, the other fully outsourced. City schools and day schools fall somewhere in the middle.
Investor Naval Ravikant — known for his sharp Twitter wisdom — chose to homeschool his kids. He says:
schools “serve as a combination of "one-size-fits-all education, compliance training, daycare, and socialization."“
they suppress curiosity and enforce conformity, and operate like "group prison camps" where students must adhere to strict rules, such as raising a hand to use the restroom.
This is a critique of schooling in general, but the problems that he points to — “one size fits all, day care, group prison camps” are only over-amplified in a boarding school setup.
Emotional Costs
Talk to any parent who is considering sending their child to boarding school, the most common quip they would have is — boarding will make their child responsible and independent.
What about the outcomes of separating a young child from their primary emotional net?
Psychologist Joy Schaverien in her book, Boarding School Syndrome, documents how early detachment and exile from family can lead to enduring distress, generalized depression and separation anxiety in adult life.
The Book is subtitled The Psychological Trauma of the 'Privileged' Child.
To be fair, this is an extreme outcome on one side. There are studies which have found positive outcomes as well, where children of early separation display greater resilience and adjustment.
But we should couple those findings with today’s context.
Jonathan Haidt’s book The Anxious Generation, published last year, explores what he calls “the great rewiring of childhood.” The teenage years, he argues, have been fundamentally altered by the rise of social media. In such a landscape, being away from parents and trusted adult supervision isn’t just risky — it can have serious and lasting consequences.
Kids need co-navigation. Every Ishan needs a Nikhumb Sir. They need to be handheld through times of such uncertainty.
Boarding schools seem ill-equipped to address the turbulence of our current times.
Asking better questions?
For parents, it’s the most uncertain of times. The answers to what is right for the child are too scattered. We’re all winging it. I certainly don’t claim to have the right answers.
But we can start by asking the right questions. And even when we don’t have the right answers, we can start by discarding the wrong ones.
Why are we sending the child to boarding school? Do those reasons hold true in today’s world? Is it checking some tasteless ego box, or actually solving a problem?
Parents will be fallible, and will make mistakes. But it will not be the same as the structural failures of distant institutions atop serene hill towns.
The Only Valid Reason?
There’s one compelling reason I can think of for sending kids to a pine-scented hill-town boarding school:
They might end up with healthier lungs.
Heck, I’d do anything for my child to breathe cleaner air.
Well…
