Education Letter: Boarding Hell

I WAS interested to read Jonathan Chapple's paen of praise to boarding schools today (Your Views, 5 November). May I presume he is also in favour of better provision for adults to cope with the after-effects of boarding school life?

My first reaction to his letter was to recite a catalogue of the viciousness and selfishness that I saw for six years at my school (thankfully, little directed at me), but that would have taken too long. The life of adolescents is by nature strange and fluid; to put a groups of them together and effectively abdicate their control to other adolescents - especially those whose main ability is to ingratiate themselves with the adults nominally in charge - is bizarre at the very least.

There is not an effective safety valve against bullying because boarding school culture "gets" whoever breaks ranks on their so-called friends.

Andrew Ruddle

Weybridge, Surrey