Psychotherapy trainer, psycho-historian and author, Nick Duffell tells us about the emotional perils of boarding school for young children, arguing that these prestigious schools create pseudo-adults, and eventually, wounded leaders.
Nick Duffell
Wounded leaders start very young
Posted on: Thu 02-Oct-14 15:09:26
(63 comments )
The prestigious Eton College, where many of the UK's leaders were educated.
A new grandparent, I regularly look at the numerous digital pictures I get sent of little Llewyn and feel a huge smile spreading from my heart to my face. Sometimes I think how his pure innocence will bump up against the world when he first goes to school. But I know he won't be sent away to board, at four, like the senior columnist I met last week, or at seven, like our prime minister. Llewyn's parents want to have him at home till he's old enough to make his own life.
True, elite boarding schools can be a fast track to positions of power. But the cost of this unrecognised neglect to the children who suffer this privileged abandonment - and to the nation that is ruled by a cadre of institutionalised boarding school survivors - is high. An ex-boarder myself, I have spent 25 years pioneering an understanding of how children adapt to institutionalization, dissociating from their feelings and developing a pseudo-adult character, the defensively organised Strategic Survival Personality, which severely limits their later lives. It is particularly bad training for intimate and family relationships, and these effects go down the generations. I have also had to acknowledge how it has affected me.
You can see young children developing Boarding School Syndrome on a remarkable BBC 40 Minutes documentary, made 20 years ago, called The Making of Them, in which young boarders were discreetly filmed over their first few weeks at prep school. It is available on YouTube; but careful: it will make you weep or angry, or both. I borrowed its title for my first book, describing psychotherapy with adult ex-boarders, whom I named boarding school survivors. To survive without touch, love and care they have to reinvent themselves; as adults they may never regain or learn emotional intelligence, for self-reliance and success are on the curriculum; feelings and empathy are not.
To survive without touch, love and care they have to reinvent themselves; as adults they may never regain or learn emotional intelligence, for self-reliance and success are on the curriculum; feelings and empathy are not.
Sending children of the well-off away to board is a British obsession. From France, where I spend half my time, our class system seems absurd, our boarding schools archaic, and our politics arrogant. Sometimes people ask me: "Why have children if you then send them away?" At other times: "Why do you talk of leading Europe when you haven't even joined?" The recent near break-up of the United Kingdom points to the political fall-out, with many people disaffected with the elite echelons of home counties power.
In my latest book I point to the politics of private boarding. Tracing the history of entitlement and a negative attitude to children in colonial times, I have come across the fear and grandiosity that characterized what I call the Rational Man Project, with boarding schools as an industrial process to churn out stoic, superior leaders for the Empire. I have added new evidence from several neuroscience experts that shows what a poor training this actually is. In short: you cannot make good decisions without emotional information; you cannot grow a flexible brain without good attachments; you cannot read facial signals if your heart is closed down, and you cannot see the big picture if your brain has been fed on a strict diet of rationality.
So if you really want to do the best for your grandchildren and you have the funds, please think twice about boarding school - unless they are 16 or over.
Nick Duffell is the author of several books, including The Making of Them: the British attitude to children and the boarding school system, Sex, Love and the Dangers of Intimacy and Wounded Leaders: British elitism and the entitlement illusion - a psychohistory. His new book, Trauma, Abandonment and Privilege: a guide to therapeutic work with boarding school survivors, with Thurstine Bassett, will be published by Routledge next year.
