The MagazinePrepped for SuccessAre the old schools still what they were?Jun 7, 2010, Vol. 15, No. 36
• By CHRISTOPHER BENSON
 The Best of the Best  Photo Credit: Corbis Becoming Elite Growing up in the Rocky Mountain West, I never had a classmate uprooted to an elite boarding school in the East. That would have been tantamount to a Gamelan dance, or lunar landing. The “foreign” has psychic sway on us precisely because it departs from our prosaic experience, luring us into an alternative narrative. My curiosity about boarding schools began with the autobiographical accounts in William F. Buckley’s Nearer, My God, in which he remembered tearful homesickness, “smothering my face with the collar of my pajamas so that I would not be heard by my neighbors,” and in C. S. Lewis’sSurprised by Joy, in which he remembered “the gray faces of all the other boys, and their deathlike stillness” in the presence of “Oldie,” the cruel headmaster who flogged students for “vulgar accents” and geometry mistakes. My curiosity deepened when I enrolled in a summer conference at Phillips Exeter Academy to undergo training in a pedagogical method named after a philanthropist (Edward Harkness)—not a philosopher (So-crates)—who sought to revolutionize the classroom through student-centered learning. I figured that this might be the closest I would ever get to the hallowed (and perhaps haunted) world of the elite boarding school. Not so. To read more, you must be a Weekly Standard Subscriber We're Sorry,
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