Rebuffed at Home, Boarding Schools in Britain Seek American Recruits

Founded in the Dark Ages and set in the shadow of a Norman castle, King’s School is not quite the Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, but some headmasters are hoping that the Harry Potter magic will help draw American students to British boarding schools such as this one.

This week, representatives of King’s and 13 other private boarding schools are in Washington on their first mission to recruit American students to a British system of education that they insist is more J. K. Rowling camaraderie than Roald Dahl weirdness, and offers rigorous academics.

“I don’t know a school in America that does what we do,” said King’s School Headmaster Ian Walker. “This is arguably the best education in the world.”

That is the pitch they are making in Washington’s Mayflower Hotel: At the end of a high school education that costs about $22,000 a year, 97% of these boarding school students go on to top-notch universities, often as accomplished in sports and the arts as they are in their studies. And many students agree that they are getting the best.

“The work is much more intense than it is in the United States,” said Lauren Bedsole, 18, of White Oak, Texas, who is Head Girl at Bradfield College, a boarding school near Reading that accepted only boys for its first 125 years or so. “It is essay-based and more focused. In the United States I took seven or eight subjects. Here I take four, so I can go into more depth.”

In her spare time, she plays basketball and badminton, and she acted in a Greek play--presented in Greek.

Some people obviously are not as enamored of this system. British boarding schools are aggressively recruiting abroad because their popularity has plummeted at home among well-to-do baby boomer parents who may not have fond memories of their own education and increasingly opt for private day schools for their children.

A boarding school education once was a must for the British elite and a preferred option for the children of foreign service diplomats and British officers deployed to far-flung posts. Fathers sent sons to their alma mater to get an upright education and a chance to excel at rugby or rowing. Their offspring were there to meet their own kind, to become political leaders or international spies, and to perpetuate the ruling classes.

But for many who went to what were single-sex schools in the 1950s and ‘60s, it was a dark and Dickensian experience of canings, cold showers and a strict hierarchy in which older boys could subjugate the young. Boarding school students typically left the security of home at 8 years of age and never learned to relate to their parents or, quite often, to members of the opposite sex, many graduates say.

An American businessman who graduated from a top U.S. boarding school before enrolling for a year at the Repton School in Derbyshire in the late 1970s recalled that he went “from a very warm, close-knit, openhearted school to the 19th century in one plane ride. . . . There didn’t seem to be much heat, even though there was a coal-fired power plant within sight and sound.”

The bathroom was downstairs and across the courtyard in an unheated shed. Boys who were no good at sports were given girls’ names, which even the teachers used. “The Irish were called ‘Mickeys’ and the Asian fellow was always teased. There was a Big Man on Campus, and it was rumored that he was Jewish. If he was, he never admitted it,” said the businessman, who works in London and preferred not to be named.

“My assumption is that it has changed dramatically in 25 years,” he added.

His assumption is correct, school officials assert. British boarding schools have undergone a revolution in part because of new laws that prohibit punishment such as canings and require more training of staff, they say. Antiquated, drafty dormitories have been upgraded, and children have more privacy.

Many students now go away to boarding school at a later age: 11 or 13 rather than 8. Schools are more focused on the well-being of the child, as well as on academic excellence, and parents are more involved in their child’s education than they used to be.

“They have changed because there are guys like me running the schools,” said Walker, King’s headmaster. “I was beaten and bullied, and I left school at 14 years old. I don’t want that at my school.”

Originally from Australia, Walker eventually returned to a school at home, then went on to study theology and philosophy in Britain, earning a doctorate in logic.

“I want my pupils to be happy first and foremost,” Walker said. “And we work very hard to say that all men are created equal in the eyes of God.”

All those who can afford the steep fees or win a scholarship, anyway.

King’s School, which originated as a church choir school in 604, was reestablished under its current name in 1541 and is affiliated with the Anglican cathedral in Rochester. Like many private schools in Britain, King’s is primarily a day school, with places for only about 70 boarders.

Head Girl Clare Webb, 17, one of the day students, says that most stereotypes of British “public school” students as snobbish and bullying are misconceptions.

“It’s a small school. Everybody knows each other from the bottom of the school to the top. We all get on,” said Webb, a cellist who plays netball for England and is waiting to hear if she has been accepted to Oxford to study modern languages.

“There are not two sides of the classroom,” added Head Boy Oliver Daffarn, 17, a rower and organist who is studying math and physics and hopes to attend Imperial College in London.

Boarding schools have looked to Asia and the former Soviet Union in recent years to make up for the shortfall in British students and to add an international dimension. There are about 70,000 students in private British boarding schools--down from about 120,000 in the early 1980s. More than 8,000 of the students today are foreigners.

Two 18-year-old Russian students, Vladimir Avdonin and Kirill Chkalov, have been at King’s School since they were 13.

“My parents considered an English education to be the highest-class in the world,” said Avdonin. “With an English diploma, it is easier to get a job all over the world.”

Like many foreigners, they say adjusting to the English weather, food and reserve took some time. They were homesick at first but came to embrace the boarding school life that advocates say offers lifelong friendships and access to a wide range of activities.

“You have a lot of friends who you live with 24 hours a day. You get a lot of help from the staff always. It’s a big family,” Avdonin said, adding, “I think I became independent faster on my own here.”

Now private school officials believe that they can take advantage of an American fondness for British history and culture to attract new students. Blatant marketing is new to British private schools, but Walker is catching on fast. He has a plan to offer ecclesiastical knighthoods to Americans wishing to make tax-free endowments to the cathedral school.

Paul High, senior consultant for the Independent Schools Information Service, which is leading this week’s recruiting mission to Washington for the 14 private schools, says they are trying to tap into a “great residue of affection by Americans for things British.” They will tout the nurturing environment of British boarding schools to high-powered, two-profession parents, as well as the great value for the money to those already considering boarding school and shopping for the right one.

And if that doesn’t work, they just might fall back on the fictional Harry Potter.

“We’ll have 14 Dumbledores offering the wizardry of British education,” High said, referring to the headmaster of Hogwarts.

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Books About Boarding Schools

These are some of the novels and memoirs about British boarding schools:

* “Jane Eyre” by Charlotte Bronte (1847). A difficult orphan, sent away to a grim boarding school, later finds work as a governess and eventually lands a husband.

* “Tom Brown’s School Days” by Thomas Hughes (1856). Like many early boarding school stories, its purpose was to educate children on how they should think and behave.

* “Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man” by James Joyce (1916). Details Stephen Dedalus’ Dublin childhood and adolescence at a boarding school.

* “The Loom of Youth” by Alec Waugh (1917). Caused a scandal as one of the first books to discuss homosexuality in the British school system.

* “Such, Such Were the Joys” by George Orwell (1953). Autobiographical essay details the horrors of life at a British boarding school.

* “The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie” by Muriel Spark (1961). An iconoclastic teacher at a British boarding school for girls has a mesmeric influence over students.

* “To Serve Them All My Days” by R. F. Delderfield (1972). A wounded veteran teaches at a boarding school near the end of World War I.

* “That’s Jennings!” by Anthony Buckeridge (1994). The 25th novel in the series about a well-meaning boarding school pupil whose exploits always bring chaos.

* “Stand Before Your God” by Paul Watkins (1994). An autobiographical novel that examines from the inside the life of an American boy in British boarding schools.

CARY SCHNEIDER / Los Angeles Times