Why Does Talking About Boarding School Make People So Angry?

Last week, I posted something on Instagram about Prince George starting at Eton. It was a thought I had in the moment, prompted by feeling sad at the thought of a young boy being separated from his family. That was it.

I was not writing a political manifesto, nor was I attacking the Royal Family. What I was doing was noticing that a thirteen year old boy, whose mother has just been through cancer treatment, is now going to boarding school. I was noticing that as a person with both professional and personal experience in this area.

What I did not expect was for that post to go viral. I now realise more fully the impact of mentioning the Royal Family and will be more conscious of that in future.

The responses came in fast. Most of them said some version of the same thing. He'll have an amazing time. He'll make lifelong friends. You have no idea what Eton is like. The facilities are extraordinary. He will have been prepared for this. Eton doesn't take just anyone. He is set up for life.

I am aware of all of that. What I was talking about was grief.

About what it means for a child to be separated from the people they love at the moment they may need them most. I was talking about this from a very specific place: personal experience of having a family member with young children seriously ill, and professional experience of sitting with adult ex boarders week after week as they trace the patterns in their lives back to their schooling and the goodbyes at school gates.

I was not saying Eton is a bad school. I was saying that separation is hard. That becoming independent and self reliant at a young age carries a cost that often only becomes visible much later, in adulthood. I was expressing that I feel something about that. I was saying you are allowed to feel something about that too.

That is the sentence that seems to be the most intolerable.

"How dare you feel sad about a child you don't know?"

So here are some thoughts on why I think many of the responses were so defensive and many people will not listen to someone who talks about some of the hidden costs of boarding school.

The feelings were cut off a long time ago.

When a child arrives at boarding school, they encounter an environment in which emotional expression is swiftly identified as weakness. Crying is wet. Loneliness is pathetic. Needing anyone is a liability. The child learns this very quickly, because the social cost of not learning it is severe.

What happens then is not that the feelings disappear. They get sealed off. The child develops what Nick Duffell has called the Strategic Survival Personality: a competent, self sufficient, high functioning exterior that protects the vulnerable part underneath. This is not a character flaw. It is a remarkably intelligent adaptation to an environment that could not tolerate what was real.

The problem is that it works so well that eventually the child genuinely cannot access what is underneath. They are not pretending to be fine. They have simply lost contact with the part of them that was not. So when someone who went to Eton writes in the comments that Eton never did them any harm and it was the best thing that ever happened to them, they may be entirely sincere. The sadness, the fear, the loneliness of that small child in the dormitory does not exist for them as a felt memory. It has been filed away somewhere inaccessible.

This is not lying. It is the system working exactly as it was designed to.

Criticism of the institution feels like a personal attack.

Boarding schools, particularly schools like Eton, carry an enormous weight of identity for those who went through them. The friendships made there, the rituals, the shared language, the belonging to something with history and status: all of this becomes part of who someone is. When I raise questions about the costs of that experience, it can feel as though I am attacking the self that was built there. If that self is the only self that feels safe, that feels whole, then the threat becomes existential.

The response is therefore not disproportionate. It makes complete sense. Push back hard enough that the lid stays shut.

Transgenerational patterns mean it has never looked any different.

For many families in this world, boarding school is simply what happens, and has done for generations. The expectation of self sufficiency, of not making a fuss, of getting on with it: these are not rules that were consciously taught but ways of being that moved silently down through families. When your parents did not do emotions and their parents did not do emotions, the idea that emotions might matter, might be worth attending to, might actually be meaningful information about your inner life, can feel not just unfamiliar but genuinely strange.

As one person commented: "It builds self reliance, better than wetty emotions."

Parents are protecting something they cannot afford to examine.

I understand how hard it may be to hear someone like me suggest that having sent their child to boarding school, it may have inadvertently caused some difficulty for them. I know that for most parents the decision comes from love and from a genuine belief that they are doing the best possible thing for their child's future. I know that they have often made significant financial sacrifice to do it, and that they have held their child up to the school gate and held themselves together in a way that costs them enormously too.

To then hear someone suggest that this decision, made with such love and such hope, may have left a mark, may have created patterns that their child is still navigating as an adult: that is not an easy thing to sit with. Of course the shutters come down. The alternative is to look at something that cannot be looked at if they are to remain intact.

I am not interested in making parents feel guilty. I am offering a pathway of understanding.

The Survival Personality is in the comments section.

When I read those responses, the ones telling me I know nothing, that Eton is extraordinary, that I should mind my business and stop projecting, I recognise the Survival Personality doing its job. It is a protector, and a very effective one. It is protecting something that, for many of these people, has never had a single safe moment to surface: the small boy who arrived at school with his trunk and his tuck box and learned, inside the first week, that the way through was not to feel it.

What the Survival Personality fears most is not my Instagram post. It is what might happen if the lid came off. The image of that boy in the dormitory, the one who cried, the one who was called wet and pathetic, the one who may have been bullied. That is what is being kept in. And keeping it in takes a great deal of energy. A comment that questions boarding school becomes, unconsciously, a genuine threat to the architecture that has held everything together.

So of course it is defended with force.

Why I will keep talking about it.

For every comment I received that told me to be quiet, that dismissed what I said as ignorance or projection, there was a silent person reading. Someone who felt something shift. Someone who perhaps, for the first time, thought: maybe the difficulty I have letting people in, maybe the reason I do not know what I feel in a given moment, maybe the way I keep everyone at arm's length, maybe that is not just who I am. Maybe there is a reason that began a long time ago, and therefore maybe I can find a way to live differently. I have received private messages from many people saying exactly that.

That is what this is for. Not to shame anyone, nor to relitigate someone else's choice about their child's education. Not to suggest that boarding school is straightforwardly harmful and that everyone who went is damaged beyond repair.

It is to name the costs. They are researched and documented, and the people who carry them deserve to have them named.

Homesickness is bereavement. Separation from your family at a formative age is grief. Learning to survive that grief by sealing it off is an intelligent response to an impossible situation, and it does not mean you are broken or weak or ungrateful. It means you were a child doing what children do when they have no other choice.

If somewhere in the pattern of your adult life, in your relationships or your sense of self or your ability to know what you feel, something does not quite fit, it is worth asking where that started.

That question is not an attack on Eton. It is not an attack on anyone who loved their time there or who is proud of what it gave them. It is simply an invitation to look beyond the narrative, if and when you are ready.

Not everyone will need to, or want to. For those who do, delving deeper into this can be truly life changing.

Further reading and resources

The Unmaking of Them: Clinical Reflections on Boarding School Syndrome (Routledge) — the most recent collection in the field, to which I have contributed a chapter.

Nick Duffell, The Making of Them: The British Attitude to Children and the Boarding School System (2000) — the foundational text on the Strategic Survival Personality and its long term consequences.

Nick Duffell and Thurstine Basset, Trauma, Abandonment and Privilege: A Guide to Therapeutic Work with Boarding School Survivors (Routledge, 2016) — explores attachment theory as the central mechanism through which boarding school does its work.

Joy Schaverien, Boarding School Syndrome: The Psychological Trauma of the Privileged Child (Routledge, 2015) — the psychoanalytic framework that gave the field its language.

If this resonates and you want to go further, I run a six month online programme for ex boarders called Beyond the Blueprint. The next cohort starts in September. You can find out more at www.theboardingschooltherapist.com/Beyond-the-Blueprint-programme-ex-boarders

If Instagram is your thing, you can follow me on Instagram at @theboardingschooltherapist for more on this