No private school can be an island. Some, like Hotchkiss and Deerfield, are in very isolated areas of New England but still have contact with the outer world (although, after seeing the outrageous clothing at Deerfield, I’m not so sure anymore). Choate is one of several prep schools that is fortunate enough to be fully integrated into a mid-sized town.
Unfortunately, the location and the differences in culture between the students and the locals tend to cause some problems. While Choate is composed of a diverse selection of bright and privileged students from all over the world, Wallingford is a typical suburban New England town. This is an odd combination that sometimes results in discordance, which is fairly common among our peer schools. Although the image of prep school students presented in books and movies, like J.D. Salinger’s Catcher In The Rye, is probably warped, we do sometimes live up to our infamous counterparts in literature and on screen. We sometimes do crazy things that go awfully wrong and affect many people. Some of us tend to flaunt our privilege, spending excessive amounts of money, flashing expensive possessions, or showcasing our natural talents, almost everywhere we go.
Once, when I was downtown with some friends, I came across some Choate students who thought that we were townies. As they passed, they made all sorts of rude and unjustifiable remarks about townies that, taken in conjunction with their rowdy behavior and air of superiority, did little to help improve Choate’s bad reputation with the locals. I know very few of us actually act like spoiled, elitist, rich kids while we are in town, but the misbehavior of that minority of students is obviously enough to aggravate townies.
Likewise, I imagine that students from other schools with problematic school-town relations (like Loomis, Taft, and Miss Porter’s, to name a few) trigger similar reactions. The problem, then, is that townies usually have a pre-conceived notion of preppies based on stereotypes and biased accounts. And, as is usually the case with prejudice, we tend to judge them for judging us. Neither contingent really understands the other, so both rely on common stereotypes and generalizations.
Before I had even heard of Choate, I often visited my older brother’s boarding school. The school had an excellent reputation and there were no parents present, so I somehow concluded that all the students were party animals and nerds. Now that I think about it, that conclusion was nonsensical. But to an outsider unfamiliar with a community of students, rationalizing the differences between the students and himself or herself is a matter of making incorrect assumptions justified by the actions of a few students that do not represent the behavior of the entire student body.
Townies are fairly familiar with Choate, but their views of us are based on a narrow set of observed behaviors. When we act like we own their town, they are certainly justified in driving around our campus and giving us a taste of our own medicine. Granted, not all of us deserve to have trash thrown at us while we walk from building to building, but, similarly, not all townies deserve to be patronized.
I doubt that the possibility of having pointless and unresolved clashes between students and locals was a major concern when the Choate family decided to found a school in Wallingford. While Choate’s many connections with town events and the presence of many day students help keep the student body in touch with the rest of the community, it is often not enough to bridge the gap that clearly exists. Even with the immense diversity within the school advocating general amiability between teenagers of all different backgrounds and cultures, we cannot fully appreciate acceptance of others unless we learn to live and cooperate with our own neighbors.
I call the townies “neighbors” because that is precisely what they are. They will continue to be our neighbors for the duration of our time at Choate, so we should treat them the same way that we treat our neighbors back home. True, it’s easier said than done, especially when it seems like we are the victims of harassment. But maybe if we paid more attention to our own subtle (and sometimes not so subtle) actions, we’d see that sometimes we are the ungrateful guests and bad neighbors.
