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Comment by barry-cotter | Hacker News Reader

> Boarding schools have always been for a minority

I sincerely doubt this. I’m not sure if my father’s school had day students when he attended but boarders were definitely a large majority. The omnipresence of boarding schools in post WWII British fiction doesn’t make any sense unless there was at least rough parity among independent schools. CS Lewis, George Orwell, Roald Dahl, off the top of my head. Seamus Heaney after looking it up.

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I think it might have been more common to send children to boarding schools among the elite, but that does not mean that it was not a small minority overall.

Obviously boarding schools are always going to be much more expensive than day schools.

Independent schools were always for a small minority. Among independent schools I’m reasonably confident boarding schools were a majority. They were not for an elite. They were for the economically successful, a middle class much smaller than what we have now but it was not unusual in small town or rural Ireland in the ‘60s for the children of shopkeepers or successful farmers to send children to board for secondary school. That’s a definition of elite so expansive as to be meaningless.

Another reasonable hypothesis is that only the elite had the opportunity to become authors

Lewis’ father was a solicitor, Dahl’s a shipbroker. Orwell and Heaney both attended boarding schools on a scholarship. Their fathers were respectively a civil servant and a farmer. Even by extremely expansive definitions of elite at most 50%.

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