A boarding school is a school where some or all pupils study and live during the school year with their fellow students and possibly teachers and/or administrators.
The word ‘boarding’ is used in the meaning of “bed and board,” i.e., lodging and meals. Some boarding schools also have day students who attend the institution by day and return off-campus to their families in the evenings.
Many independent (private) schools in the Commonwealth of Nations are boarding schools. Boarding school pupils (a.k.a. “boarders”) normally return home during the school holidays and, often, weekends. In some cultures they may spend the majority of their childhood and adolescent life away from their families. In the United States, boarding schools consists of various grades, most commonly grades seven or nine through grade twelve, the high school years. Some also feature military training, though this is generally provided only at specialized military schools. Some American boarding schools offer a post-graduate year of study in order to help students prepare for college entrance, most commonly to assimilate foreign students to American culture and academics before college.
In the Soviet Union similar schools were introduced. These were known as Internat-schools (Russian: Школа-интернат) (from Latin: internus). They differed in their organization, however, because education in the Soviet Union was free. They often were associated with orphanages (known as Children Homes) after which all children enrolled in Internat-school automatically. Such Internat-schools were not only designed for the orphaned pupils, but were often a type of specialized school with a specific focus in a particular certain field such as mathematics, language, science, sports, etc. Some such Soviet schools offered “extended stay” programs (Russian: Продленка) featuring a shared meal time providing a chance for social interaction between classmates. This program was discontinued in the 1980s.
History
The practice of sending children to other families or to schools so that they could learn together is of very long standing, recorded in classical literature and in UK records going back over a thousand years. In Europe, a practice started by early medieval times of sending boys to be taught by literate clergymen, either in monasteries or as pages in great households. The school often considered the world’s oldest boarding school, The King’s School, Canterbury, counts the development of the monastery school in around 597 AD to be the date of the school’s founding. The author of the Croyland Chronicle recollect being tested on his grammar by Edward the Confessor’s Queen Editha in the abbey cloisters as a Westminster schoolboy, in around the 1050s. Monastic schools as such were generally dissolved with the monasteries themselves under Henry VIII, although for example Westminster School was specifically conserved by the King’s letters patent and it seems likely that most schools were immediately replaced. Winchester College founded by Bishop William of Wykeham in 1382 claims to be the oldest boarding school in continual operation.