rockfreak wrote: ↑Tue Apr 07, 2020 7:19 pm
Pe.A wrote: ↑Mon Apr 06, 2020 2:23 am
rockfreak wrote: ↑Sat Apr 04, 2020 8:32 pm
You mention pastoral care. What's wrong with your own pastoral care? Are you and your wife unable to bring up your children? Or perhaps just lazy? Why send them to strangers to do the job?
Does it matter...?
Yes it does. What an astonishing comment. Can I suggest that in no other country in developed Europe would there be such a casual acceptance of sending your kids away unless you really had to (peripatetic parents for instance). Especially in the mediterranean countries where family ties are rather stronger. Nor do I buy the current get-out being touted by impudent private school headmasters and the Independent Schools Council that lots of parents are unfit to raise their children and therefore have to have them taken away to be raised. What cheek.
What happens in these cases. You take a child at an impressionable age away from the tactile, unconditional love of the family which should be every child's birthright and plunge them into an institution where love must by definition be absent. What is substituted is a kind of support along the lines of "Come on old, chap, buck up, you'll get used to it." Well, in the end they do get used to it because they have to. But because love is absent many will convince themselves that they don't need it. And conversely they themselves may get out of the habit of loving. No parents, siblings, pets - but perhaps this will only manifest itself in later life.
As for the parents, isn't it good to have the difficult task of bringing up children? It makes you more tolerant and patient and more rounded as a person, and indeed your children see you at your best and worst and this brings home to them just what is involved in family life. I don't buy the fashionable idea of "quality time" during holidays. It's quantity time and it may involve up moments, down moments, boredom and crises. But it's all part of family life. Boarding schools will always lag behind families in providing pastoral care, on minder to children ratio apart from anything else. We had three and even then there were times when it was like an episode of 'Outnumbered'.
CH propagandists make much of the "coming from difficult homes" ethos. But how many come from really difficult homes. Could I suggest that in
the vast majority of cases there is still a loving parent or parents who can do a perfectly adequate job? Isn't this why the social services try hard these days to find a troubled child a foster parent rather than opting for an institution.
First all all - b*llocks! You seem to deal in such badly informed stereotypes and a really snide, haughty snobbery with this topic.
What makes you think family ties are so much stronger in Southern European countries, anyhow...? Do you think all families are like the Corleones...?
With regards to comparisons with Europe I like to think I have a slightly different angle from which to view things since my mother was Spanish and my father Italian. Although my mother and her family left school at 11, one of my uncles was sent to board with (Jesuit?) monks in the 60s which was the only way to educate academically gifted children from rural areas back then. Similar to a few European countries, where boarding schools are not uncommon. In France, Macron plans to open up to 250 state funded boarding schools to educate children from inner cities and rural areas.
I think you overstate the case when you delve into the "You take a child at an impressionable age away from the tactile, unconditional love of the family which should be every child's birthright". I mean, do me a favour...
Where do you draw the line on this? I say this as a few of the children of family friends I knew in my teens used to be sent to holiday camps in Spain in the summer holidays, where shock horror, they would have been looked after by strangers. They always had such a laugh as well.
Similarly, as a good example you could also look at the world of youth football where young players in their early/mid teens from far afield are housed in football clubs' training academies. Obviously, this is not something one would be generally familiar with in this country since English players don't tend to go abroad at any age. I always likened going to boarding school like going to University when you're 11.
I'll leave it at that (for the time being)...