Winchester College - for the cerebral ?

[timmytoes]

I would comments from anyone who has a DS at Winchester. It seems to me that the school is suited for the cerebral, intellectual child probably with a bias to the arts/pure maths areas rather than the child who leans towards the engineering/sciences/applied maths spectrum . Is this fair ?

"WC materials seem to say no laptops in yr1 and limited in yr2."
If this seriously bother you then your looking at the wrong school. Win Coll perhaps uniquely very much walks its own path and in some ways is living in an age that no longer exists, personally for us this is part of what made it so appealing.
"He gets on fine with others, but hasn't always had many friends who share his interests. He clearly hopes to meet some at WC."
There are a wide variety of boys there, the lack of major and minor sports or indeed no sport at all if one so chooses means a boy find it easy to find like minded friends. IMO (speaking as someone whose worked in boarding schools) the camaraderie between the boys is pretty special, the care of each other and loyalty is genuine. The boys genuinely feel there is no pressure to conform and my DS had lots of different friends.
Its a personal decision whether to do the election. There is no obvious day to day advantage, my DS had scholars in every class and many commoners do as well if not better than the scholars. Im pretty sure there is nothing a scholar can do that a commoner can't, unlike some schools. If your DS very much likes his house/HM why put your DS through the agro?

Thank you, this is super helpful advice. Love that my post was answered by an IntMama... On Election, current school recommends, but it's vastly reassuring to hear the differences of experience and access may not be great. I'd heard of the option to do Exhibition but stay in House, a potential 'best of both worlds' as DS really does seem so happy with his Housemaster. With regards laptops, to me it's a huge plus for many of the exact reasons you underline. DH isn't yet convinced, but he's never shared my concerns about screentime, and he's got some good points about wise use of tech / opening doors with it (language programs, TED talks, art/architecture projects, he volunteers to create virtual learning environments for schools). Still, a hope for DS is that by meeting more friends as interested in ideas, learning and discovery as he is, and jumping in to try all that's on offer at WC, he won't miss laptop but rather the opposite. Still, it helps to hear they don't feel unprepared for programming if they take it up later. We met the maths head, who told DS about 'ProgSoc', of great interest. Second son loves dance, drama, music - much more typical of his current school, but from the posts above, it sounds like he might also discover a side of WC that he'd be happy in...

Of course the internet and tech are useful and can be imspiring but that is not the point. Teenagers nowadays will always be tech savvy and internet aficionados . They also have loads of opportunity during clubs, lessons, free time, holidays etc to do what they want with it. However this computer free period for homework for relatively short period of their lives has certainly reaped benefits for my DS with regards depth of focus and attention span for studying.
BTW Music tech is excellent at the school as well as more traditional music.

Just to be provocative, while I'm sure there are pros and cons both ways, WC's laptop policy was one of the top few reasons we chose not to apply to WC (despite DS being vv cerebral). At Eton, by contrast, they must have a computer from day 1.

DS already can focus and read for (arbitrarily!) long times, so encouragement to do that isn't a factor for us, and having no computer for the first year just seemed bizarre in this century. Tailcoats bother some people similarly, I understand

(DS was less bothered than I was, I have to say; a bigger factor for him was having a room to himself. And bigger than any identifiable factor was just general intuition.)

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Eton you obviously did lots of thinking about your pros and cons. We did no in depth research before (my DS just felt very drawn to WC when taken by his school for a visit) and did not find out about the computer policy until the summer before DS joined. It all worked out very well because the school and staff have been brilliant in so many ways for him. He has been very pleased to have had the shared room experience and retrospectively says that he knows he benefited from not having his own computer in his first year or so. Of course that view might be the equivalent of the placebo effect.

And yet, here you are reading it, yet not contributing anything positive to the conversation.