Personalising relationships: an Australian co-education boarding school as a crucible for life

Abstract

The purpose of this study was to define an Australian boarding school, provide a summary of boarding school literature and complete a small-scale qualitative investigation of students’ views in a co-education boarding school. At first glance, it appeared that contemporary Australian boarding schools were a reproduction of the influential public boys’ schools of Great Britain. In this study 45 Australian and overseas students were asked to write memoirs of 4-5,000 words about their boarding experience emphasising their thoughts, feelings and aspirations. The limitation was that all respondents were full-time boarders for at least one year when the questionnaire-survey was completed. The memoir-based humanistic approach of the Polish-American sociologist, Florian Znaniecki, as developed for the analysis of personal and group social systems in the culturally diverse context of Australia by J.J. Smolicz, was employed to interpret the memoir data. The study discovered that a number of the students were in the process of re-evaluating and re-interpreting the advantages and disadvantages of boarding school as a social system transmitted to them by parents, friends, family and teachers. The respondent’s personal statements revealed that the relationships among students, and among students and staff, in the boarding house tended to be primary in nature and that they were personal, informal, and involved the entire human personality. From this data, it appeared that the success of a boarding school was determined by the personal atmosphere, support and comfort of the boarding house. The cultural data showed that the boarding house was an adjunct to the home as the source of primary group social values, not necessarily replacing the role of the family but co-existing with it, as part of the secondary social system of the boarding school. As the boarding house belonged to a larger collegiate body and formed the axis of the less personal secondary social system, it seemed to transcend that role when it assumed primary connotation in the lives of some boarders. Overall, the memoirs support the observation that boarding school acts as a social system for the acceptance of new cultural values, such as the cultural diversity respondents’ experienced in their lives at boarding school. The study revealed an attitudinal shift in the group, which welcomed the cultural pluralism of the school and recognised the cultural monism of the home. These memoirs revealed that boarding school was a significant factor in fostering independence and an attitudinal shift towards embracing cultural diversity as experienced in the crucible of the boarding school. These findings challenged the popular maxim that an Australian residential education was an inflexible, anachronistic, colonial-British model and suggested that it has the potential to act as a system of education that prepares its students for the challenges of life.

People view Australian boarding education in terms of negative stereotypes dominated by antiquated images associated with Tom Brown’s Schooldays. Alternatively, as an educational system that has produced a disproportionate number of influential members of Australian society from academics, actors, financiers, graziers, lawyers, musicians, pastoralists, philanthropists, politicians, to novelists, it is an area clearly worthy of further sociological investigation. From the study of the students’ memoirs at the research boarding school, however, it is apparent that day-to-day life in this crucible is more than long dormitories, cold showers and stale porridge.

From Tom Brown to greater transparency

At first, it seemed that Australian boarding appeared to be the child of its British counterpart. This was epitomised by a colonial vision of England’s public schools including Eton and Winchester Colleges. A closer examination of the Australian boarding school’s evolution and history, when considered in the light of the students’ memoirs, suggests that a contemporary Australian boarding school is no longer simply the child of a British system. Instead, it has reached what might be termed ‘an awkward adolescence’. This adolescence is in full view of an increasingly critical public that demands greater transparency and accountability of its educational institutions.

From the study of respondents’ memoirs, it is apparent a new challenge is facing Australian boarding. This challenge was how far a boarding school education was meeting the needs of its students as they prepare for life in an increasingly global world. Importantly, even an idealised view of an Australian boarding school must highlight that not all individuals who take part in this community automatically feel positive about a boarding education.

The study discovered that Australian boarding was conceived because of the social ambition and vast wealth of the early squatters who demanded a standard of education comparable to schools in England for their children. After considering Cookson and Hodges Persell (1985b), Goffman (1961, 1969) Kalton (1966) and Weinberg’s (1967, 1968) work:

‘An Australian boarding school is a community where a resident academic staff is responsible for the pastoral welfare of its students, in loco parentis, and combined with the students form at least 75 per cent of the school’s total residential population. It was cut-off from broader society and often founded upon religious principles’.

However, using the memoir technique developed by Znaniecki, the researcher is able to locate through the humanistic coefficient the experiences of the past - both individual and collective - and their interpretation of the present generation through their own writings. Of the 45 memoirs (17 written by girls and 28 by boys) analysed for this study, 28 writers identified themselves as Australian, five Thai, four Chinese-Malay, four Chinese, one Malaysian, and an American. Twenty-six per cent lived in rural Australia, 40 per cent lived overseas and interstate, and 20 per cent lived in metropolitan Melbourne. The students came from nine senior boarding houses within the school and recorded the association of the house as a personal group system in the case of each of the respondents.

Because of the holistic nature of this investigation, the way the school appeared in the eyes of its international students, and the way they integrated into its academic, spiritual and various co-curricular activities, was emphasised in this analysis. However, the co-educational ‘issue’ was not selected for special study, as the responses of both genders and ethnicities were recorded. This information provided some insights into the role of the school as an institution that caters for a diversity of ethnic and gender differences.

Due to the tuition fees required to attend the school, the student population was not representative of the socio-economic population of Australia at large. This observation paralleled the findings of sociological studies carried out at English boarding and American prep. schools (Cookson and Hodges Persell 1985b; Fox 1984, 1985; Kalton 1966; Lambert 1966a, 1966b, 1966c, 1968a, 1968b, 1968c, 1968d, 1970, 1975; Punch 1976; Wakeford 1969; Walford 1983, 1984, 1986; Weinberg 1967). However, the student population of the school was culturally plural and reflected the multicultural population of Australia. The analysis of this memoir material considered the nature of the research problem for this investigation, that is, what impact did the experience of the research boarding school have upon the student’s life?

The second, more specifically theoretically-oriented, research question was: to what extent did Smolicz’s conceptual grid apply to the relations among respondents at the research boarding school?

It was understood that ‘an individual, when viewed from a sociological perspective, is a cultural value and that when viewed from the operation of a social system of which he is a part, man has a double role to play. The first is his unique capacity as a human being to function as an active agent. In this role, he evaluates and acts upon all kinds of cultural values and, therefore, also upon other human beings, but this time considered in their second role as social objects of the activities of others’ (Smolicz 1979, p.143). 

Method

The memoir method stressed that when the research considered the data collected from the respondents, it was necessary to reconstruct as authentically as possible their school milieu as seen by the writers who lived and acted in it through their own memoirs. The memoir technique of humanistic sociology was first documented in Thomas and Znaniecki’s The Polish Peasant in Europe and America, which was published immediately after the Great War in 1919. In The Polish Peasant in Europe and America, Thomas and Znaniecki developed a theoretical technique for the analysis of personal documents. In the case of The Polish Peasant in Europe and America, they analysed letters, which were exchanged between family members in Europe and those who had emigrated to America. Thomas and Znaniecki (1958, pp.305-06) classified these letters according to five subjects: ceremonial letters, informing letters, sentimental letters, literary letters, and business letters. The cultural data collected from the personal documents complemented background information taken from newspapers used to verify the authenticity of the letters.

Between the First and Second World Wars, a number of extensive surveys were completed which used the memoir approach under Znaniecki’s direction. Secombe (1997, pp.82-84) recorded that Golebiowski and Jacubczak (1964-72) repeated Thomas and Znaniecki’s study 25 years later and ‘organised a second competition to collect a whole new set of peasant memoirs’. More recently, Latoszek (1988) completed a memoir study of those involved in the Solidarity strikes at the Gdansk shipyards in 1980. As Secombe (1997) established over the past 20 years, the Polish sociologist Kłoskowska has emerged as one of the prominent supporters of Znaniecki’s memoir approach who has used this technique in her own research. Over this time, she has analysed the autobiographies of eight Polish leaders of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries using Znaniecki’s technique (Kłoskowska 1982). Secombe (1997, p.84) summarised Kłoskowska’s research on ‘national conversion’ and ‘cultural polyvalence’ of those who lived in the Polish borderlands and her analysis of the memoirs of Wojciech Kętrzyński, and the artist Joseph Czapski completed in the mid-1990s (cited in Secombe 1997 and Kłoskowska 1994).

Currently, Kłoskowska has interviewed students who were enrolled at Polish universities from diverse cultural backgrounds and analysed these data in comparison to the level of cultural valence they showed (Kłoskowska 1996). In a discussion of the memoir method, Smolicz and Secombe (2000, p.270) quoted Kłoskowska as asserting, ‘personal documents are important in revealing the extent of individual variation within a cultural group’ and the best method for ‘grass roots level research’ which concentrates upon ‘the personal experience of individual, ordinary people’.

Kłoskowska’s research has since been translated into English as National Cultures at the Grass Root Level (2001). Her study analysed the balance between the phenomenon of globalisation and national identity through the experiences of a group of young intellectuals from German, Ukrainian and Belarusian ethnic backgrounds. Recently, Hałas (1998, 2000, and 2002) has played a pivotal role in highlighting Znaniecki’s significance in ‘mainstream’ sociology as a forerunner for ‘symbolic interactionism’ and publishing a selection of Znaniecki’s writings on education previously ‘lost’ to the public sphere.

In Australia, Znaniecki’s method of collecting and analysing memoirs has been used to study the experiences of various ethnic groups (Smolicz and Secombe 1981, 1982); for investigating the nature of core values in minority ethnic groups (Smolicz and Secombe 1986; Smolicz, Lee, Murugaian and Secombe 1990); cultural becoming among university graduates (Hudson 1995); for the analysis of oral taped interviews of respondents’ from Ethiopia (Debela 1996), Welsh (Hughes 1994) and Armenian backgrounds (Milosh 1995); a study of the cultural interaction in the experience of ‘mainstream’ Australian graduates of Anglo Celtic cultural background (Secombe 1997); and a study of language and identity in the Asturias region of Spain (Arnold 2002). As in this study, some of these South Australian researchers modified the memoir method, in that participants were not required to supply full-scale life histories, but asked the respondents to complete an extended questionnaire-survey. This approach provided the respondent with a guideline for their memoirs that may ask them to consider specifically ethnic identity or the respondent’s experiences at school and in the home.

The analysis of the cultural data collected for this thesis was achieved by the examination of the attitudes and experiences through the students’ own memoirs, who reflected the cultural diversity of multicultural Australia, and its role as a country of choice for education among students and their families from the Asian-Pacific region. Therefore, the spirit of this study paralleled Lambert’s analysis of English boarding school life in which he argued that his work was ‘not an objective evaluation of boarding education’, but presented ‘one consistent viewpoint – that of the children in their writing’ (Lambert 1968a, p.6).

Evidence of shifting attitudes towards the research boarding school

The advantage of the memoir approach was that it portrayed individuals in their own context and could be used in order to trace evidence of cultural change. Znaniecki (1968, pp.66-88) understood that social change was expressed in terms of the interaction between individual attitudes and group values. In this study, some memoirs suggested change in their author’s attitude to boarding school and the factors that influenced this change. Such sentiments could be found in a number of the memoir writers that were categorised as having generally positive attitudes towards boarding school. For example, respondent 5, a male Thai born full-boarder who lived in Melbourne: 

‘Before I came to the school, it was obvious that I needed independence and a little more structure in my life. I don’t think that I had many problems with interacting with people, although I had a slight temper. Now that I look back and you’ve asked me about the likes and dislikes of my old school, I’ve realised that I am very fortunate – and I’ve never really appreciated what I had […] There is no doubt in my mind that boarding school in my mind has helped me tremendously in learning to deal with people in a variety of circumstances’. (5)

Another Anglo-Australian male, from rural Victoria, recorded the change in his perception towards the research boarding school once he was in year 12, a house captain and a school prefect:

‘I was struggling academically at my old school – I was not a bright cookie at all! I only got into my old school on the interview. Here, I’ve realised that the people in my house when I was in year 10 were not actually people I got on with (at first). Now I am a lot more willing and open to new people and ideas. I think it’s because I’ve been given a position of responsibility within the school […] I want to do well, lead, etc, but in my own different way’. (3)

A female Japanese student noted that:

‘During my first few weeks at boarding school, I was mostly homesick or actually sick. It became a disadvantage because, while everyone was getting to know each other, I was in bed. When I started boarding I had no idea how I would communicate or interact with strangers because my old school never had new people. But I think coming here developed my social skills and confidence’. (32)

The act of writing a memoir not only documents individuals’ cultural contexts and experiences through their own eyes, but also reveals to what extent they feel part of a given cultural group, or their cultural becoming of a group. In this study, it was found that all respondents were re-examining their views of an Australian boarding school and their relationships towards the boarding house. Because of the dynamic nature of the humanistic method which required respondents to reflect on the past, in order to give meaning to the present and clarify their ‘mind’s eye’ map of the future. It was possible to trace the development of students’ attitudes towards various aspects of boarding school life.

Forty-three of the 45 memoirs expressed positive attitudes overall to their experience at the research boarding school. When asked if there were any negative aspects of boarding school life, 24 recorded some negative comments and two of the memoirs were overwhelmingly negative towards life at the research boarding school. Male respondents 2, 4, 5, 7, 8, 9, 14, 15, and 17 from Anglo-Australian background expressed some negative views. Male respondents 18, 21, 22, 23, 25, 27 and 28 from overseas also expressed negative feelings. However, only female respondents 29 and 30 from overseas expressed similar views, as did female Anglo-Australian respondents 35, 37, 38 and 39.

The two memoirs, respondent 26 (a male student from Thailand) and respondent 37 (a female student from Victoria), which were overwhelmingly negative towards their experience at the research boarding school, focused their memoirs upon the difficult transition from their primary social systems to the school. This was clarified by their concrete fact profiles which suggested that the circumstances of the primary group system have the potential to have a major impact upon the students’ capacity to adapt to the research boarding school. While both memoir authors identified general advantages of attending boarding school, such as respondent 24’s ambition to improve his English language skills and respondent 37’s observations about having academic staff in the boarding house to help with homework, their views of boarding was consistently negative.

The overseas male and female respondents indicated that the experience of being immersed in a dominant host culture that was primarily mono-linguistic was in many ways a negative experience. This was because these respondents believed that it caused them to lose part of their ethnic identity, given the totality of the host culture. The researcher highlighted structural changes that the school employed to alleviate this. Nevertheless, from the overseas respondents’ perspective, this was not always enough.

Through concrete and cultural data, it was possible to conclude that cultural monism existed in the great majority of the primary social systems of the Anglo-Australian students’ homes. However, because of the social secondary group system of the school offering the International Baccalaureate, teaching Chinese, French, German, Japanese, and Spanish, having an overseas students’ committee, holding Overseas Students’ Day, and festive lunches in the dining hall, many personal statements acknowledged the existence of cultural monism in the primary social systems of the home. It was at this point that some memoirs, written by both Anglo-Australian and overseas students, revealed the possibility of the secondary social system of the research boarding school becoming an adjunct of the primary social system of the home.

From analysing these memoirs, the researcher hoped to gain a better understanding of these respondents’ views, not only for their own sake, but also as important knowledge in its own right. These data were not collated in order to make predictions about other individuals or groups. Rather, the comments were made in the context of learning how to tolerate and live with peers in a particular structure for an extended period. The following example, written by a year 12 student from rural Victoria, articulated this point:

‘Boarding school makes you a more independent, freethinking person. Your parents are not around to tell you what to do, or to tidy up after you. However, it only works for those who enjoy it […] It makes you adapt more to the outside world. Some say that it shelters you – but not really. For it provides a smaller ‘mock’ community with everything going on […] It makes you more capable (it has made me) of coping with being on your own and doing things for yourself and more socially capable, too’. (3)

The notion that the system of boarding school ‘makes you more capable’ was a recurrent theme and mentioned in nearly all 45 of the memoirs. Some respondents noted that boarding school made them aware of other individuals as forming part of a new social system that they had entered:

‘Boarding school life does change you significantly. Mainly because you are living so close to so many people […] This tends to make you far more aware of those around you and the need for you to treat them well. I also believe that boarding school changes your perception of others, in that whilst you are boarding – you realise that everyone around you has at least one talent or goal that they are focused on’. (4)

Coupled with the phenomena of individuality was a sense of being empowered, which suggested that respondents believed they would be able to deal with others in potentially stressful situations beyond boarding school life because of the totality or the crucible of the research boarding school community. Respondent 31 from Thailand wrote:

‘You are better equipped at dealing with people in stressful situations and perhaps better at figuring out what people want you to say. I think it also helps you form a core of friends which you can rely upon outside of school for support. From my experience, it gives you enough confidence to believe that you can achieve anything you want, but not without working for it’. (31)

Students who identified themselves as Anglo-Australian did not only mention this phenomenon. One female student from Thailand wrote that since being at boarding school:

‘I am more confident, more responsible. I can look after myself better than before. Boarding School helps you to understand other and care for others. It teaches me how to respect others and listen to their opinions. It is good because it prepares me for when I leave the school for the bigger world’. (30)

A female Anglo-Australian living in Brunei commented that boarding school life prepared her for the future:

‘The research boarding school has changed me to an extent that I am now able to cope with life ahead. Where I can’t depend on my parents to make decisions for me and can independently go and find what I really want in life. It has changed the way that I think about people. It has also changed some of my ways of living, to live in a group, a community where we have to respect as well as be responsible for our actions there we do, in the eyes of our peers […] to care and look out for one another’.(45)

She clarified this stating that:

‘It has really helped me [being at boarding school] in decision-making and prepared me for life without my parents. The fear of never seeing my parents […] I have now overcome as […] I have realised that I can always keep in touch with them, even though I am so far away [...] It has also helped me to realise what I would like to achieve after school’. (45)

Students’ views on religion

The research boarding school was founded as an Anglican institution in the Australian Anglo-Catholic tradition. Cookson and Hodges Persell understood that the role of religion at American prep school was the basis for:

‘[…] the creation of a collective identity, however, required more than outward discipline. Individuals must also be submerged in a belief system that guides their behaviour and instils them with the proper values. The importance of religion becomes apparent, because by religious ritual and the manipulation of spiritual symbols the young novitiates are expected to become absorbed in the brotherhood and sisterhood’ (Cookson and Hodges Persell 1985b, p.138).

The significance of a corporate religious identity was also observed by Wakeford (1969, p.124) who argued, ‘this daily service of worship though based on moral egalitarianism, serves to emphasise, or to identify, hierarchical levels in the school’. Berger (1966, pp.64-65) stressed the humanistic quality; individuals had to re-examine and reinterpret their past, present and future when discussing life changing experiences such as religious conversion.

The data analysed presented an interesting juxtaposition between the researcher’s observations and the respondents’ memoirs. Given the culturally diverse population of the school, as reflected in the concrete fact profiles of the respondents, the majority of the memoirs appeared to be ambivalent towards organised religion at the research boarding school as seen in the memoirs of male Anglo-Australian respondents’ 5, 8, 11, 12, and 13 and female Anglo-Australia respondents’ 33, 37, 42 and 45. However, the ambivalence expressed by the respondents did not correlate to the participation of students in the Mass celebrated in the school’s chapel. The high number of students who received the host during communion primarily supported this observation.

Those respondents who expressed personally positive attitudes, American born male respondent 1, Anglo-Australia memoirs 3, 6, 9, 10, 14, 15, 17, overseas male respondent 26 and female Anglo-Australian respondents 35, 40, 41, indicated that the school had provided them with the framework for a set of personal religious values which was important to them for life. In contrast, it is possible to suggest that for the majority of students from non-Christian backgrounds, such as male overseas respondents 21, 22, 23, 25, 27 and 28 and female overseas students 31, and 32, the values expressed by worship in an Anglo-Catholic tradition will not have a lasting impact.

A boarding house as a primary group social system

Smolicz’s claim that it was possible to divide individual social systems into two types as ‘primary personal’ and ‘secondary personal’ as seen in Table 1: Classification of social systems and Figure 1. Elaborating further, Smolicz cited the home or family as a primary personal and group system and that a school, a university, or an office represented a secondary group social system. Smolicz observed the relationships in primary social systems were personal, intimate, and ongoing. Conversely, the secondary social system relationships tended to be more formal, distant, and spasmodic. Once Smolicz’s conceptual grid was considered in the light of the respondents’ memoir data, it was expected that in this research group individuals would act as a secondary social bonds for each other in the research boarding school and house.

Table 1 Classification of social systems. Adapted with permission from Smolicz (1979, p.149; 1999, p.143)

Type of System	Primary	Secondary
Personal	Primary Personal	Secondary Personal
Group	Primary Group The family	Secondary Group The School

 

After analysis of the respondents’ memoirs, a variation surfaced in Smolicz’s original conceptual grid. It seemed that for many of the 43 generally positive memoirs the secondary systems of the boarding house within the school adopted the characteristics of primary group systems and that the relationships to individuals within them, such as other students and teachers, revealed qualities comparable to primary values of the family. Initially this analysis of the respondents’ memoirs appeared to the support the findings of the international studies of Cookson and Hodges Persell (1985b), Kalton (1966), Lambert (1968a), Morgan (1993) Wakeford (1969), and Walford (1983, 1984 and 1986).

The examination of respondents’ views suggested that Smolicz’s conceptual grid of personal and group social systems initially developed in the late 1970s outlined in Figure 1. The primary and secondary value systems of respondents at the research boarding school according to the application of Smolicz’s original conceptual grid for the classification of social systems has particular resonance and theoretical implications for the analysis of residential education in the multi-ethnic context of contemporary Australia. It seemed that this grid has the potential to act as a theoretical framework combined with Znaniecki’s humanistic coefficient to determine the extent to which an individual feels that they are part of a boarding house and or school community.

Table 2: Classifications of social systems in the research boarding school shows that the types of relationships that took place in primary social systems were personal, intimate and ongoing. Conversely, the secondary social system developed relationships that tended to be more formal, distant, and spasmodic. In this research group, it was discovered that an individual formed two Houses. In the case of overseas male students’ memoirs 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24 and 17 and overseas female students’ memoirs 28, 29, 30 31, and 32 this appeared to be even more intense as they represented an ethnic minority in the host culture kinds of personal primary bonds: one that drew some of their personal values from the family and the other that drew personal values represented by respondents’ friends from the boarding

Table 2 Classifications of social systems in the research boarding school. Adapted with permission from Smolicz (1979, p.149; 1999, p.143).

Type of System	Primary	Secondary
Personal	Primary Personal	Secondary Personal
Group	Primary Group The family and the boarding house	Secondary Group The research boarding school

 

From cultural data collected, the social system of the boarding House for respondents appeared to represent an adjunct to the primary social system of the home within the wider secondary group system of the school itself. This proposition was supported by extracts taken from respondents’ memoirs. Each of these respondents noted how the relationships they established with their peers and some of the academic staff who acted as boarding house tutors in loco parentis adopted the characteristics of primary personal values for the students, or they even perceived themselves in this way.

These observations expressed in the respondents’ memoirs were personal and intimate; it revealed an appreciation of the flaws and complexities a member of staff faces when working in the primary group system of the boarding House, on one hand, and then the school on the other. Another male full-boarder from rural Victoria adroitly noted:

‘Some […] teachers here are […] inspirational […] a lot of this depends on personal relationships […] I think of some teachers as friends because they have helped me through difficult times. I think I trust some of them as much as any other student’. (4).

Another full-boarder from rural Victoria stated:
‘It is a difficult position for both teachers and students at boarding school. It must be hard […] to develop a friendship with a student and maintain professionalism at the same time’ […] (6).

Given that the research boarding school was a formalised educational structure, which framed the initial relationships between each of the respondents and their teachers, from the cultural data collected it was possible to see that the relationships among many students and among students and staff in the boarding House tended to be personal and informal, this having qualities similar to the primary relationships of the family. The boarding House acted as a primary personal system to that of the family co-existing with it rather than replacing it. The boarding House as a community, also belonged to a larger collegiate body and hence formed part of the school as a secondary social system. However, it appeared that the boarding House transcended that role when it assumed values that had primary connotations in the lives of boarders. This new application of Smolicz’s original conceptual grid summarised was developed because of cultural data collected in this thesis. 

The research boarding school as a crucible for life?

The memoir comments revealed boarding school has the potential to act as a cultural crucible or a critical social system for the transition of the new values embodied by the cultural diversity they experienced in their lives at the research boarding school and have the potential to be carried beyond their schooling.

This analysis of the overseas respondents’ cultural data revealed that an effective boarding house adopted characteristics which replicated the informality and intimacy of the primary social system. Herein lay an interesting juxtaposition found in the memoir data. The views of the respondents who experienced life in the boarding House and school supported Cookson and Hodges Persell’s (1985b, pp.124-143) attitude that the residential education qualities resembled a crucible.

Issues for further research

The holistic perspective of this study and the researcher’s decision to limit the participation of respondents to the final years of the school - years 11 and 12 - who were aged from fifteen to eighteen in this study. Particular emphasis was placed upon the way the research boarding school appeared in the eyes of its international students, however, the co-educational issue was not isolated for investigation in this study as both male and female students were documented in the empirical section. As a result, it is important to recognise that this study is highly specific to the research boarding school and no generalisations to other residential institutions are possible.

A memoir study on a larger scale than the one which has been undertaken could investigate the attitudes of students towards boarding in Australia as a whole. When the researcher investigated the literature that examined Australian boarding, it was clear that there has not been enough research conducted in this country in order to accurately indicate the state of boarding. A study of the teachers in boarding schools would help the public to appreciate the particular demands and rewards of boarding in this country. Another study potentially of particular interest would be a comparison between the memoirs of Australian, American and English schools, which could reveal if there were similarities and difference in boarding schools established in different cultures.

Conclusion

The research boarding school, presented a formalised educational structure, which framed the initial relationships between students and teachers. At the research boarding school they were more formal or controlled in the sense that they were part of an educational dialogue - the student and the teacher - the educator and the educand - as discussed by Znaniecki (1998, pp.154-160).

The boarding house acted as a community belonging to a larger collegiate body and hence formed part of the school as a secondary social system, but it transcended that role when it assumed primary connotation in the lives of boarders. The attitude of ‘independence’ so often discussed in memoirs can be regarded as the result of an apparently symbiotic social system which acted with the family as seen in Figure 2. The primary and secondary values systems according to the respondents’ memoirs where the boarding house acts as a primary personal value system co-existing with the family, rather than replacing it. These new data revealing a new application for Smolicz’s (1979, p.149; 1999, p.143) original theory for the classification of social systems.

Overall, the students’ comments were generally positive and revealed boarding school as a critical social system for the transition of the new values embodied by the cultural diversity they experienced in their lives at boarding school. It also revealed a number of Anglo-Australian and overseas students who were in the process of re-evaluating and re-interpreting the advantages and disadvantages of boarding school as a social system as transmitted to them by parents, friends, family and teachers.

In the light of these findings, these characteristics unusual for a residential secondary group social system of this nature and the concrete and cultural evidence discussed, the data suggest that the research Australian boarding school was a crucible which had the potential to promote positive attitudes towards cultural pluralism for students. Given the research boarding school’s inherent international population the researcher found that this institution was at a threshold of significant educational innovation. Students were provided with a permanent and on-going opportunity for the cultivation of positive cross-cultural interaction amongst the ethnically diverse population of the school - students and academic staff - as a result of:

• day-to-day contact with students and academic staff from diverse ethnic backgrounds in the secondary social system of the research boarding school
• day-to-day contact with international students’ in boarding houses which adopted the characteristics of a primary personal group system;
• international students’ awareness week
• the chance for students to study French, German, Japanese, Mandarin Chinese and Spanish.

This boarding school was presented with the opportunity to act as a model for an Australian residential education which fostered a sense of tolerance based upon the principles of ethnic pluralism. It is apparent from the respondents’ memoirs that the boarding school should to pay particular attention to the needs of their overseas students so that they will feel more a part of the dominant host culture without losing essential aspects of their own ethnic identity. Whilst the school has made a number of positive steps towards recognizing the needs of overseas students reassessment of the school’s policy and position on overseas students is required if they are to benefit in the long term from being members of a genuinely international boarding school community.

Conversely, the dominant host culture appears to have benefited greatly from the presence of the overseas students in their community. This was supported by the positive comments made by Anglo-Australian respondents who expressed the multicultural population of the school as one of the major strengths of the institution. From the respondents’ memoirs, it is apparent that an Australian boarding school possesses the potential to act as a crucible for life which can promote and encourage aspects of tolerance for others and service to the community whilst also being able to express a certain amount of individualism. The challenge that faces those who are responsible for the maintenance and future of these types of school will lie in their capacity to critically reassess the experience of the student population. This is particularly important in the case of a boarding school that has a population of students from a range of ethnic backgrounds.

From the memoirs of the respondents, it was clear that friendship was the strongest value that emerged in the students’ lives at boarding school. It was a type of friendship that was enduring, intense and in some cases transcended cultural differences. However, as friendship emerged as one of the strengths of boarders’ lives in the research school it also suggested that students from overseas backgrounds were more likely to seek out, establish and maintain friendships amongst their own or similar ethnic background. The intensity of these friendships appeared to adopt the characteristics of friendships forged in close primary personal relationships.

From the respondents’ memoirs, it appeared that they believed that the boarding education at the research school prepared them in part for their future roles in a diverse set of cultural circumstances. In the first instance it seemed that many respondents believed that the research school would prepare them to become independent in the broader world of tertiary study and in the case of many overseas students provided them with the English language skills that will help them in commerce and the law in the future. These attitudes showed how they believed that the experience of boarding school was significant in fostering independence and an attitudinal shift towards embracing cultural diversity as experienced in the secondary social system of the school – which for some students became just as, if not more important, than the more culturally monistic primary social system of the home and prepare them for life in an increasingly global world.

References

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Dr Mathew White is a Fellow in the Melbourne Graduate School of Education at the University of Melbourne, in Victoria, Australia. He is also the International Baccalaureate Coordinator and Assistant Head of Manifold House at Geelong Grammar School (GGS), Australia. He was admitted to the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the School of Education at the University of Adelaide, South Australia, in December 2004.

 

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