Global Perspectives on Boarding Schools in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries

Gerster, Daniel; Jensz, Felicity

Zusammenfassung

This introductory chapter to the edited collection brings together detailed case studies of boarding schools,  framing them as a global and transcultural phenomenon of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It examines the ways in which these schools extracted, and at times excluded, pupils from their original social background in order to train, mould and shape them so that they could fit into the perceived position for them in broader society—a form of inclusion. In this way, boarding schools predominantly affected the education of two particular groups: the children of underprivileged classes and those of the ‘elite’, with these groups widespread around the (European dominated) world. In this introduction, we outline some commonalities of the case studies, but also some differences and contradictions. We begin by defining what we understand as a ‘boarding school’, sketching very briefly the history of the phenomenon as such, and the varied forms that existed throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In a second section, we situate our collection within a broader historical research that has been undertaken on ‘boarding schools’ and global entanglements. In a third step, we introducing the structure of the volume and its case studies in more detail.