Meaning of finishing school | Babel Free

Definitions

A private school intended to furnish young women with the social skills and cultural education needed in order to fulfill successfully a woman's traditional role in polite society.

dated

Equivalents

Examples

“"All she needs is a year or two at a fashionable finishing school, so that at eighteen she can come⟳ out with éclat," put⟳ in Aunt Clara.”

“Until the 1920s, most European high schools for girls were finishing schools.”

“On the advice of a well-heeled friend from Indonesia, she then decamped to Switzerland to attend⟳ the Institut Villa Pierrefeu. “They call⟳ it ‘the finishing school that refuses to be finished,’” Ms. Ho explained, the last⟳ in a dying form⟳ of pedagogy that asks wealthy women to scrutinize the folds in napkins with an intensity akin to Watson and Crick studying the double⟳ helix.”

CEFR level