educational experiences that change a life

Boarding-School Blues By PICO IYER, author Older boys were allowed to beat younger ones at my 15th-century English boarding school, and every boy had to run a five-mile annual steeplechase through the sludge and rain of an October day, as horses do. We wrote poems in dead languages and recited the Lord’s Prayer in Latin every Sunday night. At my previous school, in preparation, we had to race through cold showers every morning at dawn before a breakfast of lukewarm kippers or porridge. Fourteen of us, aged 9, shared a single damp chamber and, clutching teddy bears, thought of parents in faraway Hong Kong or Nairobi or (in my case) California. Well-meaning friends shudder when I recall my school days for them now; I glow nostalgically. Forty years on, I see my relentless training in these ancient institutions (partly monastic and largely military) as the most benign influence in my life, and one of its happiest memories. The world is tough, the system was saying, and to find happiness in it you have to summon resilience, resolve and self-sufficiency. This is a process developed over centuries to teach you how to govern yourself and how, as the Buddhists say, to live joyfully in a world of sorrows.