J.K. Rowling has done much to revive the literary genre of boarding school stories, which achieved its greatest (pre-Potter) popularity in the period between Tom Brown’s Schooldays (1857) and the mid-twentieth century. As a setting, boarding schools allow for the construction of thrilling narratives: concerned parents are replaced by teachers who may well prioritize student achievement over student welfare, e.g. maximizing points for Gryffindor over the survival of the students earning those points. Because the students cannot easily walk away from the school, they must deal with teachers and other students, some of whom may be vividly villainous (Miss Minchin, for example—the antagonist in Frances Hodgson Burnett’s A Little Princess).
Are there any SFF novels featuring boarding schools? Why yes! I am glad you asked—there are more than I can list in a single article. Here are just a few.
Joe and Jack C. Haldeman’s 1983 fix-up There is No Darkness features an institution called Starschool. It is both school and starship; its itinerary includes a dozen-plus worlds scattered across the Confederación. Each world offers opportunities for students to find themselves in way over their heads. Protagonist Carl Bok, who hails from a backwater planet, must prove himself to his wealthier and more cultured schoolmates. He strides confidently into danger and then must do his best to extricate himself.
Terry Pratchett’s Pyramids (1989) introduces Ankh-Morpork’s Assassin’s Guild…or to be more exact, the institution that trains the assassins of tomorrow. Entry into the school is easy, whether one is poor or, like Pteppic of Djelibeybi, of actual nobility. Between induction and graduation, students receive an education in all the ways that living beings can be ushered into the afterlife. One in fifteen of the students emerges having mastered these techniques. The other fourteen gain personal acquaintance with sudden murder. Still, everyone agrees that the Assassin’s Guild is a lot more fun than the Jester’s Guild next door. Pteppic of Djelibeybi may survive the school—only to find that it’s actually less frightening than the looming danger waiting for him at home.
Kazuma Kamachi’s ongoing series of short novels and their associated manga and anime (A Certain Magical Index, A Certain Scientific Railgun, A Certain Scientific Accelerator, etc.) is set in Academy City. The city is home to over two million students, most of whom have some degree of reality-breaking Esper power. Some can control electromagnetism; some can keep objects at a constant temperature. Imagine the Xavier School for the Gifted with the population of Paris, France. Unlike the leadership of Xavier’s school, however, the people running Academy City are ambitious people entirely unfamiliar with the concepts of consent or ethics….
Christopher Brookmyre’s 2009 Pandaemonium features St. Peter’s High School. It isn’t technically a boarding school, but it ventures into boarding school territory when administrators arrange a retreat for students in a secluded facility. The teachers and staff have only the best of intentions: the outing is an effort to ensure that the students come to terms with the recent death of a schoolmate. Alas, the staff have not vetted the facility’s neighbours as well as they should have, which is why it takes the attendees some time to become aware that they will be dossing down next to a portal to Hell. Coming to terms with death swiftly becomes a universal experience.
Most denizens of boarding schools are dispatched there by their parents or guardians. In Nicky Drayden’s 2018 Temper, twin brothers Auben and Kasim have connived to win their way into a prestigious boarding school; they’ve blackmailed their wealthy father (whose paternity is unacknowledged; he prefers that it stay that way). The twins enroll in the hope that somewhere in the school’s well-stocked library is a hint about how to cure the brothers’ ongoing divine possession. It’s good to have goals when one heads off to higher education; the twins manage to achieve unimagined heights. Of what, I’m not telling you…
So, if you are a writer and your youthful protagonists are burdened with parents as doting as they are competent1 , don’t despair! Simply invent a suitably Dickensian educational establishment that offers full-time living quarters and dispatch them hence. Adventure can only follow!
In the words of Wikipedia editor TexasAndroid, prolific book reviewer and perennial Darwin Award nominee James Davis Nicoll is of “questionable notability.” His work has appeared in Publishers Weekly and Romantic Times as well as on his own websites, James Nicoll Reviews and Young People Read Old SFF (where he is assisted by editor Karen Lofstrom and web person Adrienne L. Travis). He is surprisingly flammable.
[1]There is another solution, which I have encountered in the works of authors from Heinlein to Jones, which is to provide the protagonists with parents and other guardians who are distracted, indifferent, or cheerfully obstructive. No wonder their kids don’t turn to them for help. Tanith Lee preferred to employ the simplest solution to interfering parents: the sixty-one Lee novels I read in 2016 featured forty-four dead mothers (and one aunt) and thirty-seven dead fathers (and an uncle.). The few living parents in her novels were often so toxic that the orphans may have been the lucky ones.
As a child I found the whole concept of boarding school vaguely horrific. Needless to say I not only didn’t attend one I knew nobody who had.
Saltation, by Sharon Lee and Steve Miller, sends 16 year old Theo Waitley to a piloting academy on another planet. In addition to the challenges of school, roommates, and finding friends, the planet is becoming increasingly nativist, posing its own dangers. In Fledgling, the first book in this series (a subseries in the authors’ Liadan universe books) Theo had a brief but fraught experience at a boarding school on another planet. The school on her home planet, though not a boarding school, is also fraught in its emphasis on conformity to norms, teamwork, and Safety–very broadly defined.
Ender at Battle School in Ender’s Game
CS Lewis’ the Silver Chair is bookended by scenes in a boarding school which sounds horrendous- although the protagonists are swept off to Narnia
Fantasy:
• A College of Magics by Caroline Stevermer – as in the title
• The three Collegia – for bards, healers and heralds – in Haven, Valdemar by Mercedes Lackey
• Mademoiselle Geraldine’s Finishing Academy for Young Ladies of Quality in the Finishing School series by Gail Carriger, where ‘Finishing’ has more than the usual meaning…
• Institute of Special Technologies from Vita Nostra by Marina and Sergey Dyachenko (yes, despite the shool name it’s firmly on fantasy side of the shelf), highly reccoemended.
SF:
• Galileo Academy from Martians Abroad by Carrie Vaughn
No Witch Week? I would have thought Diana Wynne Jones would be well on your radar for this one!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Witch_Week
I was only familiar with the comedic boarding school stories, like the Nigel Molesworth books, when Harry Potter came out. So it was a bit jarring to read about teachers trying to murder the students. “Qirlll has second HEAD under his TURBAN and let trol into skool to kill me chiz chiz chiz 1000000 boos to Voldemort and thu rest.”
No Earthsea? The mother of all boarding school stories.
Ah, yes. Ged, the boy who lived. Whose foe was a disembodied spirit of dark significance…
Well, speaking of murderous teachers– Aglionby Academy, in Maggie Stiefvater’s The Raven Boys and its sequels, isn’t precisely a magical boarding school. But it does tend to attract both teachers and students of unusual backgrounds, or capabilities, or states of existence– and it really does need to be more careful when hiring its Latin teachers.
In Ballad, Stiefvater also gives us the Thornking-Ash Conservatory School, for students whose musical talent has attracted otherworldly attention.
The Imperial University of Carthak, in the first of Tamora Pierce’s “Numair chronicles,” has a lower-school division where magically talented children are accepted as young as eleven. Tempest and Slaughter definitely qualifies as a boarding-school story. And I guess, so do her “Circle of Magic” books and the Winding Circle temple school for mages.
The first part of Justina Ireland’s Dread Nation features a boarding school for young zombie hunters.
And let us not forget Watford School,in Rainbow Rowell’s Carry On, which has quite a lot to say about Hogwarts.
I have not read the last. Please tell me more.
There are a good number of these in manga. For example Rosario + Vampire (which starts as a harem comedy and ends as a coming of age action series) has Tsukune Aono unknowingly going to a boarding school for monsters after finding an application to it by “accident” and failing to get into every other high-school in Japan. The anime of the same name has only a tangential relationship to it since it made it’s own fanservice story to go with names and designs from the manga.
If you consider a service academy as a kind of boarding school, then Heinlein’s Space Cadet and Starship Trooper could qualify for this list.
I don’t but I lack a rigorous defense for that position.
@13 Starship Troopers doesn’t count. Johnnie attends regular school with his friends and then goes off to bootcamp not school. The two takes I had on English boarding schools come from movies more than books . One was IF… with Malcom McDowell a dark and scary place , Mr. Chips, not as horrible still wouldn’t want to go there. For American ones it’s Dead Poet Society and the Facts of Life tv show. I always thought it was weird that Harry Potter loved school so much usually boarding school stories are about escaping them, but the Dursley’s were horrid people and made Harry live in a closet for most of his life. I had enough trouble staying at Summer Camp. I’d have hated boarding school. Now colleges on the other hand I’d have handled better I think at least emotionally.
@@@@@ 5, Spriggana:
A College of Magics by Caroline Stevermer – as in the title
Stevermer wrote a sequel called A Scholar of Magics.
I like it better than ACoM.
@15 You are right that only part of Johnny’s adventures would fit the “boarding school” category. I was thinking of his time at Officer Candidate School, or whatever they called it in the book. Come to think of it, Heinlein’s Between Planets and Red Planet both have sections where the main character in a true boarding school.
Nothing paranormal, but I’ve always been a sucker for the MONTY PYTHON’s and Michael Palin’s RIPPING YARNS boarding school comic bits.
Here are some of my favorite paranormal boarding school books.
THE UNEXPECTED ENLIGHTENMENT OF RACHEL GRIFFIN, L. Jagi Lamplighter. Young young adult. Fantasy. Rachel Griffin enters the magical Roanoke Academy, finds new friends, and stumbles upon a magical conspiracy that threatens not only her friends and the school, but the entire world. Along with the usual tropes of the magical school, Lamplighter gives us a heroine with the best of Harry Potter, Ron, and Hermione, as well as an interesting world of magic and clues that the reader will pick up from our own world that the characters will not. An excellent read.
THE HOUND OF ROWAN, Henry H. Neff. Book 1 of “The Tapestry.” Young adult contemporary fantasy. Ten-year-old Max McDaniels sees something magical in a tapestry in a museum, and before you can say “Harry Potter,” he’s being attacked by monsters and sent to a small private school for young wizards where he must deal with the usual problems of school as well as various magical ones. Meanwhile, the school and Max himself have enemies circling. The book definitely has a Harry Potter as well as a Percy Jackson feel to it, but Neff creates a detailed history and magical beings which gives the story some originality, and Max is a good kid.
ARCANUM 101, Mercedes Lackey and Rosemary Edghill. Young adult contemporary fantasy. After Tomas Torres starts using his ability to conjure fire and throw it to make money for his family, he’s caught for arson, but he’s sent to a “special” boarding school instead of jail. Yes, it’s a school for mages and psychics to train them to use their gifts safely and correctly. VeVe Langenfeld is his student mentor. She’s also a talented battle mage who has been fighting monsters since she was a little girl. This novel is mainly an introduction to the school, Tomas’ discovery that real magic and monsters exist, and that he has considerably more to him than anyone can guess. A nice story but maybe a little low key for kids expecting lots of action. Boys should enjoy this story because of Tomas’ viewpoint and his interest in repairing cars.
I’m starting to get a hint about these articles, James. When you describe a book I know, I don’t recognize it from the description.
And I just looked up Pratchett’s Pyramids at my library. It describes the lead as “a student” but says he becomes Pharoah and the rest is all about that. I haven’t read the book, and I realize both the library’s description and yours have too few words to really convey a Pratchett.
Nonetheless, your capsule summaries are, in my eyes, untrustworthy leads for my TBR stack. Unless you’re purposely being whimsical and expecting readers to already know the story and to snicker at your description.
More words might help if my goal is yours.
Sarah Rees Brennan’s In Other Lands combines the magic boarding school with the country in the other side of the wardrobe.
I’m surprised not to see Nnedi Okorafor’s Binti stories here.
I have only read the first, and I did not like it myself, but they have been very popular so presumably I’m in the minority.
“Qirlll has second HEAD under his TURBAN and let trol into skool to kill me chiz chiz chiz 1000000 boos to Voldemort and thu rest.”
Fantastic – would read.
but wot is this that hoves into view across muddy waste of old skool quidischthch pitch? “hello clouds hello sky hello stars”. it is luna lovegood chiz chiz who is an utter wet and thinks she kan predict the futur.
nancymcc @@@@@ 19:
And I just looked up Pratchett’s Pyramids at my library. It describes the lead as “a student” but says he becomes Pharoah and the rest is all about that. I haven’t read the book, and I realize both the library’s description and yours have too few words to really convey a Pratchett.
For what it’s worth, roughly the first quarter of the novel has the main character (who becomes Pharaoh) attending the Assassins’ School in Ankh-Morpork. After that, he’s back in his home country; there are occasional memories and references to life in the School. So while it’s not a book about a boarding school and nothing else, it does qualify as a book “featuring” a boarding school.
Unless you’re purposely being whimsical and expecting readers to already know the story and to snicker at your description.
Hmm… to be fair, I would say that’s part of James’s style, yes.
Nevernight! (kinda)
@@.-@: C. S. Lewis’ autobiography talks about the real-life horrific boarding school he went to (Malvern, as I recall, though Lewis disguised the name as “Wyvern” (again, if my memory serves me right)).
Amayrillis, also in Tamora Pierce’s Tortall series Alana and Kel both attend a boarding school.
C. S. Lewis’ autobiography talks about the real-life horrific boarding school he went to (Malvern, as I recall, though Lewis disguised the name as “Wyvern”
He also referred to his hated prep school (Wynyard School) as “Belsen”. The headmaster was sued for assault on a pupil and ended up in a mental hospital.
George Orwell also wrote a piece about boarding school, featuring St Cyprian’s, the nightmarish boarding school to which he was consigned. “Such, Such Were the Joys”, if I recall correctly.
“The school on her home planet, though not a boarding school, is also fraught in its emphasis on conformity to norms, teamwork, and Safety–very broadly defined.”
Delgado tries to be a boarding school for its faculty and their families! I don’t remember where Theo’s classmates lived.
Three of the later Hodgell books have Jame at Tentir, which is a service academy kind of boarding school. Being Jame and thus having Miles Vorkosigan’s effect on authority despite being racially Always Lawful X, she’s not always actually where she’s supposed to be.
In terms of isolating children from parents I feel ‘camps’ serve the same function as boarding schools, so we have both Lumberjanes and the Percy Jackson series.
Anime: Princess Tutu, and I’m guessing Zero’s Familiar.
“Songmaster” – Orson Scott Card
Curiously, “Spiderman – Into The Spider-Verse” qualifies for this as well. Miles Morales goes to a boarding school in Brooklyn, even though his parents live within walking distance. I don’t know if this is from the comics, but the movie doesn’t do much with the boarding school thing.
The webcomic Gunnerkrig Court features a boarding school, the eponymous Court.
Seanan McGuire’s Wayward Children books surely count. The Magicians series is borderline — IIRC, the kids are a bit older than I would really consider a boarding school book; same for some of the other titles mentioned.
@14: I don’t but I lack a rigorous defense for that position. How about this: “boarding school” suggests the unusual case of a school that isn’t normally boarding; in the U.S., that would be for kids roughly ages 6-17. A service academy is a college (ages 18 and up, with exceptions), which assumes a student body from a wide enough area that most of them are boarders. (Yes, there are also commuter colleges; IME they’re the outliers.) That’s why I’d tend not to accept A College of Magics and its semi-sequel A Scholar of Magics — although both of them are excellent books. ISTM that part of the point of boarding-school stories is that they involve people not yet of legal age. (Let’s not talk about actual maturity, as not displayed in many US movies about college….)
wrt Rowell — I won’t try to explain it as I’ll probably get it wrong; it makes mere meta look ordinary. But it’s definitely not as musty as the Potter books, which often feel like they’re set between the two world wars (like the mundane St. Clare’s books).
And you would bring up a book I’d never heard of by an author (Brookmyre) whose mundane work I like, which book is being offered used for $150+ on Amazon. I wonder if it’s less unfindable in Commonwealth countries.
Brookmyre is readily available in Canada. I don’t know if Chapters Indigo will sell to Americans but if they will, try them.
The Womby’s School for Wayward Witches series by Sarina Dorie features a boarding school for untrained teens to learn how to control their magic. A very diverse group of teachers including a djinn, a sasquatch, a vampire, and others. Lots of incidents with both students and the teachers. A bit of sex between teachers adds some zip to the stories.
Awww, c’mon, now. RED PLANET is THE classic boarding school novel. And, who could forget BETWEEN PLANETS, which brought us the saddlephone?
Morning Glories, published by Image Comics, written by Nick Spencer: This is about a sinister prep school where the adults are hiding secrets and are not to be trusted by the students. The genre is the thriller/mystery/supernatural horror category. 50 issues published; on hiatus.
If you’re not tired of the Nigel Molesworth at Hogwarts joke yet, someone wrote an entire fanfic of it: https://www.fanfiction.net/s/894155/1/ho-for-hoggwarts.
@11: If “tell me more” was in reference to Carry On, there’s a nice (semi-spoilery) discussion from a few years ago, right here on Tor:
https://www.tor.com/2015/11/16/carry-on-harry-potter-fanfic-remix/
The Zero Blessing by Christopher Nuttall is about a child from a high ranking magical family made to go to a boarding school for magic users, only she has no magic and is told she needs to hide that fact so her family doesn’t lose face. It’s interesting how she deals with it.
All Men of Genius by Lev Rosen is about a girl inventor who wants to go to the school where all magical geniuses go, so she takes on her brother’s identity.
The Elemental Trilogy by Sherry Thomas is another girl pretending to be a boy to get magical training in a boarding school, this time so she can fulfill a prophecy along the way.
Seanan McGuire’s Wayward Children series fits, though not in a standard way.
Kipling has Kim attending an Anglo-Indian boarding school – and the novel might as well be SF! Indeed it has plainly influenced a lot of SF writers.
Joan Aiken’s 1962 children’s novel The Wolves of Willoughby Chase has both an evil governess and an evil boarding school. And the competent, loving parents are only presumed dead. It’s set in an alternate 19th century England, which makes it SF, I guess?
Charlotte Sometimes by Penelope Farmer – a tale of time travel at boarding school. A
Really? No one mentioned Heinlein’s Red Planet, with the hateful headmaster who imprisons Willis, then later the Company holds all the colonists prisoner inside the school.
@@@@@ 42, Stephen Clark:
Kipling has Kim attending an Anglo-Indian boarding school – and the novel might as well be SF! Indeed it has plainly influenced a lot of SF writers.
If we’re admitting Kim, we should include Kipling’s boarding school fix-up, Stalky & Co.
Kipling didn’t just influence SF writers. He wrote a few SF stories himself, including With The Night Mail.
We should also include Thomas Hughes’ Tom Brown’s School Days.
I’m astonished no one has yet mentioned the Doyenne of boarding-school stories, Angela Brazil: or the longest-running boarding-school series in novel form, the Chalet School: or the best-written boarding school series ever, which also has a number of SFnal and fantasy spin-offs on AO3, Antonia Forest’s Marlow books, about half of them set at the Kingscote school.
While I feel sure Brazil’s plucky little heroes would deal with alien invasion, spaceships, or magic, with equal elan, the Marlows – existing canonically in any British time period from WWII to the present day, over a period of in-book time lasting about two years – have appeared in AO3 in time-travel, Harry Potter, and the Vorkosiganverse.
Kipling’s up for a Prometheus again.
I’m a sucker for stories set in schools. Real schools, I mean. Hogwarts doesn’t qualify.
Josephine Tey’s Miss Pym Disposes is a set in an elite girl’s boarding school. It teaches physical-training; games, sports, gymnastics, medicine. Think gym-teacher with an English accent. Miss Pym Disposes is all about the school, with a murder mystery almost an afterthought. Since Josephine Tey had undertaken just such training, she knew whereof she wrote. You can read it here: http://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks07/0700671h.html
Robertson Davies wrote a string of novels that involved Colborne College, a private boy’s boarding school. It shows up in Fifth Business, the story of Dunstan Ramsay, who spends his life teaching there—when he isn’t hunting saints. Later books show their protagonists attending Colborne, with Ramsay as a bit player.
@19: It would probably be more accurate to characterize the Binti trilogy s surviving the journey to and from boarding school. (I was personally a bit disappointed that the school didn’t get that much page time.)
@31: It was emphasized a lot more in the original comics – Miles’s roommate Ganke has a bit more to do there. (The original run leads off with how Important it is that Miles got into a charter school. YMMV as to how well this has aged.)
It’s a not a prep-school. It’s live-in Oxford college. An imaginary woman’s college. Much concerned with women’s liberation. In the 1930s. That itself almost qualifies it as a fantasy.
How can we have missed Gaudy Night by Dorthy L. Sayers?
@51, the Woman Question, as they used to call it, is MUCH older than the sixties. The first women’s rights convention in the US took place in 1848.
@@@@@ 52, princessroxana:
the Woman Question, as they used to call it, is MUCH older than the sixties. The first women’s rights convention in the US took place in 1848.
True enough. In America that was the thin edge of the wedge. Progress was not fast.
Within living memory of Sayers’ protagonists, suffragettes were arrested, beaten, force fed, and occasionally killed.
@@@@@ 53, Fernhunter:
Exactly. We’ve ‘Come a Long Way, Baby’ but it took a long time. Also in fairness goals shifted somewhat over that time from the vote to equal pay and so forth. At one time Temperance was a huge part of the feminist movement. In the thirties career and education were the focus. Hence Shrewsbury College.
@51-54: Not so fantastic — Shrewsbury College is a thinly-disguised version of Oxford‘s Somerville College (founded 1879), from which Dorothy L. Sayers had herself graduated with honors. Gaudy Night was published in 1935; British women had gotten the right to vote in 1918.
The book was advertised as “a novel – not without detection”. Sayers was attempting to write a detective story that was also a serious novel of ideas. I think the result is excellent.
Richelle Mead’s “Vampire Academy” series, with its two races of vampires borrowed from Romanian folklore — and wonderful relationship between the two heroines, vamp aristocrat and pugnacious half-breed bodyguard — is something I remember fondly and plan to reread.
As befits their origin in Eastern Europe, the civilized, magic using Moroi are Eastern Orthodox in religion, and follow the ethical teachings of a vampire saint (!) who lived centuries before. Their K-12 boarding school, located in a remote part of Montana, is called St. Vladimir’s in his honor.
A Moroi who kills becomes a soulless, ageless, almost invulnerable Strigoi — and some Moroi make that choice. The Strigoi are completely selfish and self-centered, but are showing alarming signs of learning to work together in their eternal war with the Moroi.
The narrative is unusually grown-up for a YA series. The two young women recognize the problems and injustices of their own society but, considering the alternative, fight to defend it rather than blow it up. Though they do break its laws a lot!
Mead followed up the six-book “Vampire Academy” series with “Bloodlines”, also six books, in which minor characters from the previous series are the protagonists. More romantic and less adventurous, I found it of limited interest.
WARNING: Current editions of “Vampire Academy” include a sample chapter from “Bloodlines” which spoils the main story arc of the original series. Do not read.
Josephine Tey’s Miss Pym Disposes is a set in an elite girl’s boarding school. It teaches physical-training; games, sports, gymnastics, medicine. Think gym-teacher with an English accent.
No, it’s not. It’s set in a (residential) teacher training college. There are no girls in the novel at all; the students at the school are adult female humans, known as “women”.
@@@@@ 57, ajay:
No, it’s not. It’s set in a (residential) teacher training college. There are no girls in the novel at all; the students at the school are adult female humans, known as “women”.
I do not submit myself to political correctness.
Especially when it requires rewriting the text to fit modern standards.
They are called girls all through the book. Here’s a typical example:
She was also amused to observe that the Thomas who slept was most undeniably Welsh; a small, dark aborigine. And that O’Donnell, who had now materialised from a voice in the bath, was equally unmistakably an Irishwoman; the long lashes, the fine skin, the wide grey eyes. The two Scots—separated by the furthest possible distance that still allowed them to be part of the group—were less obvious. Stewart was the red-haired girl cutting up cake from one of the plates that lay about on the grass. (“It’s from Crowford’s,” she was saying, in a pleasant Edinburgh voice, “so you poor creatures who know nothing but Buzzards will have a treat for a change!”) Campbell, propped against the bole of the cedar, and consuming bread-and-butter with slow absorption, had pink cheeks and brown hair and a vague prettiness.
If it’s good enough for Josephine Tey, it’s good enough for me.
@58/Fernhunter — I am shocked, shocked by the ethnic stereotyping in the text you quote.
Which reminds me, the next time I’m in Barnes & Noble, I think I’ll have myself a little Tey …
@@@@@ 59, taras:
I am shocked, shocked by the ethnic stereotyping in the text you quote.
Which reminds me, the next time I’m in Barnes & Noble, I think I’ll have myself a little Tey
It’s astonishing what they got away with in those antediluvian days.
Scroll up to @@@@@ 49. The link will give you Miss Pym Disposes.
The Tey is free. You’ll have to supply the crumpets yourself.
People have brought up the examples I know, but as somebody who was bullied throughout school, when reading about it as a child, boarding school always sounded like a nightmarish hell. I could never understand why any loving parent would put their kids through that, lol (not trying to put judgment on other cultures where that’s more normal).
But I was also raised in a very tight family structure (very close to parents, aunts, uncles, cousins, grandparents, etc) so the idea of being away from my family unit for long periods of time also sounded weird. I mean – yes, I moved out for college, and actually loved dorm living, so I don’t mean forever. But during my formative years I can’t imagine having been away from my family.
Hex Hall series by Rachel Hawkins – it’s fairly recent (2010) and marketed as YA but not too angsty or annoying. It’s a fresh twist on the magical boarding school and quite funny.
Btw I discovered Rachel Hawkins on SmartBitchesTrashyBooks.com, which was recommended by someone on here. The recs have come full circle.
61: I think neglect was part of the point. Cannot built the Empire without legions of vicious sociopaths to fill out the officer corps and run the various bureaucracies and step one to that is school out every drop of human decency.
@61: If you were “bullied throughout school” anyway, you might have been better off in a well-run boarding school.
@62: I will look up the “Hex Hall” series.
I’ve been enjoying the anime series, Little Witch Academia, on Netflix.
@63: You might say the purpose of the English boarding school was to produce a sufficient supply of Winston Churchills. The theme of all the boarding school narratives cited above is that solving your own problems makes you stronger.
Winnie was tough enough to survive any ragging. His nanny came to visit him at Harrow and he welcomed her with a kiss right in front of the other boys. A classmate called it the bravest act he’d ever seen.
@64 – well, maybe, but the idea of NEVER being able to get away from my tormentors is chilling (especially with no support system). And few of the boarding school narratives involve well run boarding schools ;)
Granted, I thankfully went to school before the internet was a thing, so even kids that aren’t in boarding school still have to deal with their tormentors after school-hours.
@@@@@ 63, James Davis Nicoll:
I think neglect was part of the point. Cannot built the Empire without legions of vicious sociopaths to fill out the officer corps and run the various bureaucracies and step one to that is school out every drop of human decency.
It’s unlikely that the British boarding school would turn out sociopaths. They are more born than made. Such a school may have done little to teach sociopaths to parrot normal standards of behavior.
Besides, it’s an unnecessary hypothesis. Boarding schools are also good at training bureaucrats. Someone busy counting widgets doesn’t worry about the way the Raj treats the natives.
In its day, Kipling’s poem If was the most popular poem in the English speaking world. Not least because copies hung in every office of every bureaucracy in the British empire.
If you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you,
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
But make allowance for their doubting too;
If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
Or being lied about, don’t deal in lies,
Or being hated, don’t give way to hating,
And yet don’t look too good, nor talk too wise:
If you can dream—and not make dreams your master;
If you can think—and not make thoughts your aim;
If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster
And treat those two impostors just the same;
If you can bear to hear the truth you’ve spoken
Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,
Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken,
And stoop and build ’em up with worn-out tools:
If you can make one heap of all your winnings
And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,
And lose, and start again at your beginnings
And never breathe a word about your loss;
If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew
To serve your turn long after they are gone,
And so hold on when there is nothing in you
Except the Will which says to them: ‘Hold on!’
If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,
Or walk with Kings—nor lose the common touch,
If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you,
If all men count with you, but none too much;
If you can fill the unforgiving minute
With sixty seconds’ worth of distance run,
Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it,
And—which is more—you’ll be a Man, my son!
@67/Fernhunter: Not only in its day. In 1995, the BBC made a poll to find “the nation’s favourite poem”, and “If” was the winner. It got twice as many votes as the runner-up (see The Nation’s Favourite Poems from BBC Books).
@67, @68: Of course the boarding school narratives concentrate on the experiences and adventures of the kids.
But you raise some interesting questions about the effect on society, as the kids grow into adults and eventually take over.
If you introduce the future elite to each other when they are kids, they get to know each other‘s true character before they learn to cover it up — before the coward can learn to pretend courage, before the sociopath learns to convincingly sham ethics and consideration for others. As they grow into adulthood, and take their places in society, they know who they can trust and who they can’t — which, we may speculate, might help account for the astonishing success of the British Empire, for example.
Thus, the next question is: have any of the authors we have discussed above followed their characters after the end of boarding school, and showed us what becomes of them in adult life? We get the glimpses of the adult Harry Potter, for example, in the recent play about his son. Are there any other examples?
@@@@@ 68, taras:
If you introduce the future elite to each other when they are kids, they get to know each other‘s true character before they learn to cover it up — before the coward can learn to pretend courage, before the sociopath learns to convincingly sham ethics and consideration for others. As they grow into adulthood, and take their places in society, they know who they can trust and who they can’t — which, we may speculate, might help account for the astonishing success of the British Empire, for example.
In the Sharing Knife series, the Lakewalkers do much the same thing. They send patrollers to work in neighboring territories. When patrols must merge to deal with a malice emergency, there are patrollers on each side who know each other and can work together. Those who have walked around the lake are particularly valued in this context.
Thus, the next question is: have any of the authors we have discussed above followed their characters after the end of boarding school, and showed us what becomes of them in adult life? We get the glimpses of the adult Harry Potter, for example, in the recent play about his son. Are there any other examples?
Kipling wrote other stories about Stalky & Co, following them into adulthood.
@@@@@ 68, JanaJansen:
Not only in its day. In 1995, the BBC made a poll to find “the nation’s favourite poem”, and “If” was the winner. It got twice as many votes as the runner-up (see The Nation’s Favourite Poems from BBC Books).
I would have bet on William Blake’s Jerusalem.
And did those feet in ancient time
Walk upon Englands mountains green:
And was the holy Lamb of God,
On Englands pleasant pastures seen!
And did the Countenance Divine,
Shine forth upon our clouded hills?
And was Jerusalem builded here,
Among these dark Satanic Mills?
Bring me my Bow of burning gold:
Bring me my arrows of desire:
Bring me my Spear: O clouds unfold!
Bring me my Chariot of fire!
I will not cease from Mental Fight,
Nor shall my sword sleep in my hand:
Till we have built Jerusalem,
In Englands green & pleasant Land.
@71/Fernhunter: I didn’t know that one.
The only William Blake in the top 100 was “The Tyger” (place 18), a poem I can’t read without hearing the soundtrack by Tangerine Dream in my head.
@71 Certainly within the possibilities of it being the English nation’s favourite hymn/poem/nationalistic anthem, but whether it would be the rest of the UK’s favourite is up for grabs.
In Margaret Ball’s Lost in Translation, Allie’s daddy sent her to school in Europe. She ends up in a different boarding school, rather farther away.
In that universe, magic works.
In that university, Allie is expected to learn it.