Education and culture: An Australian coeducational boarding school as a crucible for a culturally diverse life as seen through the eyes of the students themselves. A humanistic sociological study

Abstract

What effect does the experience of a coeducational boarding school education have upon a student’s life? The aims of this study were to define an Australian boarding school and report upon the findings of a small-scale qualitative investigation of students’ views in a co-educational boarding school. The personal documents-based humanistic approach of the Polish-American sociologist Znaniecki, as developed for the analysis of personal and group social systems in the culturally diverse context of Australia by Smolicz, was employed to interpret the personal documents data. The humanistic approach emphasized that the author must accept cultural phenomena from the viewpoint of its participants. In this study 45 Australian and overseas students were asked to write personal documents of 4–5,000 words about their boarding experience emphasising their thoughts, feelings and aspirations at Geelong Grammar School (GGS). Overall, the personal documents support the observation that boarding school acts as a social system for the acceptance of new cultural values, such as the cultural diversity respondents experienced in their lives at boarding school. These findings challenged the popular maxim that an Australian residential education was an anachronistic, inflexible, colonial-British model and suggested that it has the potential to act as a system of education that prepares its students for the challenges of life.