Small School Advantages

Small Schools: Big Impact!

The research is remarkably consistent: smaller schools generally achieve better academic results, promote better student behavior, give students more opportunities for involvement, and inspire higher rates of parental support and involvement than big schools, be they public or private.

For a summary of this research, go here. 

In response, some might say "Yes, but students in smaller schools are not as exposed to the diversity of people typical of larger schools, and for this reason, get less practical experience preparing for the real world ."

Though not talking of schools specifically, the famous Christian writer G.K. Chesterton disputes the logic of this objection, when he discusses the advantage of smaller communities and towns:

It is not fashionable to say much nowadays of the advantages of the small community. We are told that we must go in for large empires and large ideas. There is one advantage, however, in the small state, the city, or the village, which only the wilfully blind can overlook. The man who lives in a small community lives in a much larger world. He knows much more of the fierce varieties and uncompromising divergences of men. The reason is obvious. In a large community we can choose our companions. In a small community our companions are chosen for us. Thus in all extensive and highly civilized societies groups come into existence founded upon what is called sympathy, and shut out the real world more sharply than the gates of a monastery. There is nothing really narrow about the clan; the thing which is really narrow is the clique. The men of the clan live together because they all wear the same tartan or are all descended from the same sacred cow; but in their souls, by the divine luck of things, there will always be more colours than in any tartan. But the men of the clique live together because they have the same kind of soul, and their narrowness is a narrowness of spiritual coherence and contentment, like that which exists in hell. A big society exists in order to form cliques. A big society is a society for the promotion of narrowness. It is a machinery for the purpose of guarding the solitary and sensitive individual from all experience of the bitter and bracing human compromises. (G.K. Chesterton, Heretics, #14, 1905)

Following Chesterton's argument, "bigness" often leads to "cliquish-ness," as students seek out other students who share their own interests, temperaments, and often the same socio-economic class and tastes. But in smaller communities, students' companions are chosen for them, with all their idiosyncracies and temperaments, and they must learn to get along with each other. 

At St. Bartholomew, we value the relationships formed between teachers, students and parents. We believe these relationships help us build a culture of mutual support and high aspirations. And we also think it's fun to know each other!