THE PRESIDENTIAL DEBATE

Why go to boarding school? It is not because of "innovation': not Platinum LEED certifications, not a presidential alumnus, not pop-culture references, and not an overspending football program. Leave these superficial medallions of 'HR talk' to universities that can do it way better than anything a high school in Connecticut can muster up. The reason we go to boarding school is because of one thing, community, an idea seemingly alien to Choate Rosemary Hall.

Sitdown dinner might seem antiquated. Assigned seats? A teacher at every table? Student waiters? What are we? Back home? Precisely! It is f.:un.ily-style dinners that we share with our classmates, not cliquey, awkward eating clubs. You get to meet students you would never in a lifetime cross paths with. Where else can a new student without any connections feel like they are part of a community than at a roundtable where the ice is broken by good food and conversation? Deerfields sitdown meals are where bonds are formed. The class dress of coat and tie means so much more to us than what outsiders might see as "Pinterest-worth( A uniform by definition equalizes the student-body. It cultivates community by upholding respect for a standard. When you see another student in coat and tie, no matter who they are, what classes they take, , where they are from, you can rest assured that they too have bought into Deerfield. But tradition does not dictate austerity, rather it kindles those flames of childhood down to us by generations past, not because the school forces us to, but because we want to. Getting students up early in the morning is no easy feat Yet every Friday we wake ourselves to march into the Deerfield River. We are our brother's and sister's keepers in this weekly trial, we are our own tradition's keepers.

Sure "innovation" is all the buzz in our age of artificial intelligence, and we might seem old-fashioned with our phone rules. But how does it feel to say hello to everybody you see on the street and have them respond to you with their face not buried in their phones? How does it feel to go to a school where everybody knows your name? At Deerfield, students feel human. To be in a community is to feel human, and to attend a boarding school is to be in a community. Choate, I hope that you too will be worthy of your heritage, that you will one day, uphold your heritage as a boarding school.

Patrick Zhang may be reached

at pzhang26@deerfield.edu.