Word: bowness
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Noah I. Dauber's "Let Boarding Schools Bow Out Gracefully" (opinion, Nov. 16) gives a distorted, unfounded and altogether ignorant account of modern boarding schools. While he criticizes David Hicks (the former rector of the boarding school I attended, St Paul's) for demonizing the self-interests of teenagers, Dauber himself portrays all boarding school students as conceited, arrogant, "fleece-wearing friends" from suburbia. Furthermore, Dauber confuses Hicks' view of boarding schools with the general purpose of those schools, and thus concludes erroneously that boarding schools will, in the near future, "bow out gracefully" as schools become more liberal...
Take a look at the pictures on the fifth floor of Lamont. They show Lamont first opening to accommodate Harvard's homogeneous white male coat-and-tie student body. Then, by Dauber's logic, we should have expected Harvard to indeed "bow out gracefully" around the 1960s, as diversity began to prove itself increasingly important in education...
...schools will survive precisely because they have moved away from that 1950s image. No longer a scene from "Dead Poets' Society," boarding schools today provide opportunities for some students that never existed before. They are reaching out to attract disadvantaged students to their schools. Boarding schools absolutely should not "bow out gracefully." In fact, boarding schools in the future will provide the best environments to address many of the problems that plague campuses across the country today. Both boarding schools and colleges face a new challenge -- finding a balance between the tradition that defines them and the progressivism that dominates...
...American boarding school. He himself seems convinced that the boarding school's best days are over. His caricature of modern-day adolescence is overblown and unconvincing, while his recommendations for the future are nearly nonexistent. We should, without attacking today's teenagers, let the American boarding school bow out gracefully...
...Europe, is already at risk. Only Mobutu's will and wizardry have held the place together for so long. His style of rule combines charisma with a flair for draconian repression. (As part of an "authenticity campaign" in the '70s to divest Zaire of its European taint, he outlawed bow ties, public kissing and Christmas.) But he also successfully marketed his country to the West as a bulwark against Soviet expansion in Africa, until the collapse of the Soviet Union robbed him of his usefulness...