Parental Supervision Required

CURTIS SITTENFELD - New York Times: "IN 1989, when I was 13 and living in Cincinnati, I waged a one-girl campaign to persuade my mother and father to let me attend Groton School in Massachusetts. Despite my parents' ambivalence about boarding school, they ultimately acquiesced, I went, and I received a very good education - not all of it academic. More than a decade later, I couldn't resist setting my first novel at a boarding school. Now at readings, I'm asked if I'd send my own child away to school, and I say no.

My naked hypocrisy isn't the only reason I feel apologetic in these moments. It's also because the person who asks the question usually is middle-aged and gives off a certain preppy whiff - perhaps he's wearing seersucker pants, or maybe her voice has that assured, WASP-y thickness - and it seems highly likely that my questioner already is or soon will be a boarding-school parent.

But it turns out I'm not alone: an increasing number of parents are deciding against boarding school. Enrollment at private day schools has grown 15 percent in the past decade, while enrollment at boarding schools has grown only 2.7 percent. Overall boarding school enrollment dropped from about 42,000 in the late 1960's to 39,000 in the last school year - even though, according to the Census Bureau, the population of 14- to 17-year-olds was more than 1.5 million higher in 2004 than in 1968.

Reporting on this, The Wall Street Journal attributed the shift away from boarding school to a trend of greater parental involvement, which translates into parents reluctant to be apart from their children. This is, evidently, the same reason some parents are now accompanying their teenagers to boarding school; these mothers and fathers literally move, sometimes cross-country, to be close to the campuses of the boarding schools their children attend.

While the new breed of super-involved parent strikes me as slightly creepy (having worked as a private-school teacher, I've also seen parents whose idea of "involvement" is doing their children's homework for them), I don't think the conclusion they've come to is the wrong one. Among the reasons I wouldn't send my own child to boarding school is that being around one's adolescent peers 24 hours a day doesn't seem particularly healthy. It makes the things that already loom large in high school - grades, clothes, sports, heartache, acne - loom even larger.

Going home at night provides physical distance from the relentlessness of all teenagers, all the time, and, ideally, parents provide perspective. Although they might be dorky, parents know an important lesson about everything from serious hazing to the embarrassment of dropping a lunch tray in a crowded cafeteria: This, too, shall pass.

Certainly teachers provide an adult perspective at boarding schools, but it's a very unusual teacher who influences an adolescent as much as the average parent does. Furthermore, while many boarding school teachers knock themselves out on students' behalf not just by teaching but also by coaching and running dorms, they're undermined by lesser teachers who, rather than guiding students out of teenage pettiness, seem themselves to get sucked down into it. There is on every boarding school campus some variation on the doofus teacher who, if he's not actually buying beer to ingratiate himself with the popular senior guys, sure seems to wish he could.

The self-containment of boarding schools can create terrariums of privilege in which students develop a skewed sense of money and have a hard time remembering that, in fact, it is not normal to go skiing in Switzerland just because it's March, or to receive an S.U.V. in celebration of one's 16th birthday. At, for example, Choate Rosemary Hall - one of many boarding schools starting classes this or next week - room, board and tuition for 2005-2006 is $35,360. If, as Choate's Web site explains, 27 percent of students receive financial aid, that means the other 73 percent come from families that are, by just about any standards except perhaps their own, very rich. Even when these schools hold chapel services espousing humility and service to others, it's the campus facilities - the gleaming multimillion-dollar gymnasium, say - that can send a louder message.

It's hard not to wonder: in a world of horrifying inequities, at what point do these lavishly maintained campuses go from enriching and bucolic to just obscene? Can a student living on such a campus be blamed if, logically working backward, she starts to think her access to such bounty must exist because she deserves it? It is this line of thought, I suspect, that gives rise to the noxious attitude of entitlement and snobbishness that is simultaneously less common than pop-culture depictions of boarding school would have you believe and also not that hard to find.

FOR me, the question isn't why parents wouldn't send a child to boarding school as much as why they would. Unless there are either severe problems at home or flat-out terrible local schools, I don't see the point. Even in the case of terrible schools, I'm not convinced that parents can't significantly augment their children's education. Among the advantages of boarding school are opportunities for independence, academic stimulation, small classes, peer companionship and the aforementioned campus beauty - but every single one of these opportunities is available at dozens of liberal arts colleges, so why not just wait a few years until the student will better appreciate such gifts and save $140,000? Besides, then there's no risk of college feeling anticlimactic, as it can for boarding school graduates.

Of course, none of this is what I thought when I was 13. I thought then, and I still think, that boarding school seemed interesting. It's a place where bright, talented adolescents rub up against each other figuratively and literally. Our culture is fascinated by the rich and the young, and elite boarding schools are a place where the two intersect. That doesn't mean you'll automatically be better off if you attend one, but it does make it unsurprising that they've retained a hold in the popular imagination.

It's not that I see boarding schools as evil. I just don't see them as necessary, and despite their often self-congratulatory rhetoric, I don't see them as noble - certainly no more so than public schools. At the same time, I recognize the hubris in declaring how I'll raise my as-yet-nonexistent children, and probably nothing makes it likelier that I will send them to boarding school than publicly vowing I won't. I'm not planning on it, but life is hard to predict and perhaps at a parents' weekend 20 years from now, standing on the sidelines of a verdant lacrosse field, I'll be the one wearing seersucker.

Curtis Sittenfeld is the author of the novel "Prep.""