Education in an Emergency the Private School
I
GUNS and bombs in the Pacific have punctuated, if not punctured, the educational theories of the past twenty years. Seven million secondary pupils await the deliberations of school authorities. Two hundred thousand graduates of the class of 1942 will soon present themselves to the admissions officers of various colleges. Those who direct this cross-section of America are endeavoring to face the world chaos with candor, courage, and a program of essentials. It is a time for integration rather than analysis; the ‘batteries’ of intelligence and achievement tests are literal necessities in the face of the enemy, rather than mere figures of educational speech.
College faculties are first on the field, designing an accelerated plan which shall cut down the undergraduate period by one third. They are deliberating to what extent radio communication, map making, aviation, and many other emergency courses shall occupy the curriculum. Secondary educators, national, local, and private, are endeavoring to help young people, who have lived all their lives in the aftermath of a world war and a financial depression, to cope manfully with a state of sudden change, with dot-and-dash thinking, mechanistic mass methods, and new uncertainties. It is to their credit that they recognize the right of American youth to an uninterrupted school life and all its valuable by-products, as the British still do with their draft limit set at nineteen years of age; but they wonder what ingredients are essential for the winning of the war, maintenance of American democratic ideals, and the basic minimum cultural standard. Parents, with their minds on mounting taxes and the impending stroke of the draft registration clock, are considering ways and means for their children’s sake. Hence the cost, the human adjustments, and the most desirable type of training are three insistent problems in education as America grimly settles down to a policy of self-denial and effort, with the ultimate aim of building a peaceful and coöperative world.
II
The private or independent schools aggregate little more than one fifteenth of their public or tax-supported counterpart. But they have had an influence far out of proportion to their numbers. Their past has been a distinguished one indeed; they carried the entire burden of colonial and early United States schooling until the twenties of the last century. They set the pattern for the high school, and they have continued to pioneer in many ways ever since. No wonder parents are asking what is to be the function of the private schools, characterized as they are by smaller classroom units and backed in many cases by religious denominations, with endowments varying from ten million dollars down to none or the pay-as-you-go plan.
Finances are naturally uppermost in the minds of their patrons and directors; this is the ghost that now rattles its chains with the greatest frequency. Some friends of the private schools have suggested that state or Federal authorities might grant subsidies equal to individual pupil cost, and thus bestow what could be called public scholarships. A few look hesitatingly towards the National Youth Administration. There is a certain amount of justice in this query: for it is clear that every ‘paying guest’ removed from the attendance roll of the community public school relieves that community of a burden. If the five hundred thousand students in private secondary schools were to be educated in public schools of high standards the added burden on the taxpayers would be about fifty million dollars per annum. There is obviously a quid pro quo value in preserving the private schools.
Many private schools, however, are chary of accepting any public aid. They feel that they should spin the fabric of economy out of their own resources. They ask no handicaps. They feel that the strings of public control might become shackles. They call attention to the fear of political pressures such as might stifle freedom of discussion and action. They prefer to plan more Spartan ways of living, tightening the academic belt, as Mr. Willkie has several times suggested. Similar conditions have occurred in the past and were met by the birth of Andover and Exeter during the Revolution, by the activities of Horace Mann in the panic of 1837, and by old Sawney Webb’s plain-living establishment at the close of the Civil War in Bell Buckle, Tennessee.
Self-service by pupils, with a maximum amount of school chores, is no new thing. To what extent it reduces cost is still to be determined; a prominent headmaster has calculated that such economies in his own school would result in a saving of only fifty dollars per individual. School farms, however, worked by the boys, have begun to operate in several cases with a larger reduction of overhead expense. Afternoon jobs in certain industrial centres, on an apprentice basis, are being planned for pupils of country day or boarding schools. Senior students, properly qualified, are doing tutorial work with younger pupils. If 60 per cent of a good school’s budget goes toward payment of teachers, and if we agree that a minimum of cutting is desirable in this department, its authorities should prune hard at the remaining 40 per cent. School athletics may be rationed more economically; more time may be devoted to chores beyond mere housekeeping. Work camps are being set up for vacation periods.
Barter and payment in kind may return again from the misty past of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, when a calf appropriately arrived on the scene in company with an entering student, or a cord of firewood paid the first term-bill. One thinks, along with many financial experts, that the symbol of the future may be visioned as units of work rather than units of money. The semi-public endowed academy, an inheritance from a century ago, is being encouraged.
Defense activities in many schools have accentuated the habit of useful occupation in contrast to the rampant selfindulgence which marked the years following World War I. While government authorities have advised against premature military training at the secondaryschool stage, there has been an increase among young people in private schools who are willing or eager to toughen themselves in other ways than through athletics. Airplane spotting, map making, radio communication, photography, meteorology, first aid, assistance at medical examinations, metalwork, ground aviation, navigation and naval architecture, junior policing, forestry, road engineering — all these are claiming enthusiastic attention. ‘Even the headmaster,’ said one school paper, ‘swings a wicked pick.’ Whole buildings have been erected by squads of boys. Girls have taken over certain phases of Red Cross activity, nursing, and food hygiene. Student councils have suggested the conservation of automobile tires by establishing intramural athletics in place of outside contests. If the school must perform the functions of the home, it is surely fair to argue that every economy and effort should be made to employ teachers who will spend nine hours at a country day school or sixteen hours at a boarding school in continuous attention to the characters as well as the minds of their charges.
III
The days are gone when the private school could be justly accused of encouraging social distinctions or snobbishness. There are as many differences in financial standing among the parents in a purely tax-supported institution as there are between the families which send their children to a public school and the families which pay tuition. Within the last few years the private schools have been giving more thought to the question of democracy and coöperation, to the obliteration of any distinction between public and private education on social grounds.
A prominent magazine not long ago accused the private school of not furnishing enough citizens who would enter public service and hold office. And even educators are wondering whether justice is being done in an educational way to the 10 per cent of private-school graduates and the 80 per cent of public-school graduates who do not go to college and for whom the college preparatory program is not suitable.
The man in the street, however, will open his eyes if the service rendered by the private school is made clear to him. The pamphlet recently published by the Country Day School Association, and the address of Frank Ashburn contained in the Proceedings of the Seventy-Fifth Anniversary of St. Mark’s School, are revealing documents. Mr. Ashburn, in speaking of public service, humorously calculated that, if a certain preparatory school which in 1934 had graduated a thousand men in its fifty years of existence could represent a ratio constant for the whole population of the United States, there would have been ‘37,000 Presidents, 333,000 Ambassadors or Ministers, 111,000 Senators, 111,000 Governors, 37,000 Congressmen,’ and, among other professions, ‘37,000 Pulitzer Prize Winners.’
In the private schools a spirit of coöperation with the community is manifesting itself in many ways. One institution is solving the problem by offering regular classroom service to a specified number of boys from the surrounding region. Several others have established regional scholarships. A country day school in the Northwest included a two-weeks review session without charge for all College Board Examination candidates from the publicschool quota of a near-by city. Another shares a series of its auditorium lectures, given by its faculty members, with the adults of the town. Another opens its recreation grounds on a share-alike basis to Boy Scout troops. Another has an ‘open night’ at its observatory. Others report hobby groups on many subjects, from Greek to mechanics, from journalism and printing to agriculture, from music to photography, open to interested young people and adults in the neighborhood. Many boarding and country day schools send their seniors to attend civic and political gatherings in order to learn the routine of the responsible voter. There is a clearinghouse among private schools for boys who desire summer jobs on farms, or in factories, or in the merchant marine.
In other words, the spirit of the 4-H Clubs, which spread through agricultural America, and the industrial uplift of the Junior Occupation Service are elements which of themselves will leaven the formerly easy-going philosophy of the American adolescent, without the hard and metallic drive which has characterized the German totalitarian enslavement of youth.
IV
However thorny may be the financial path which the private schools are traveling, and whatever may be the goals of democracy in the next decade, it is clear that both private and public schools have an equal and coöperative share in the program. There is no reason to denounce the former as oligarchical. Both groups are deeply interested in what President Conant has called a ‘flexible classless society.’
In the third phase of our problem, however, the private schools are capitalizing a golden opportunity for national service. They are trustworthy custodians of the cultural tradition and the religious heritage of Western Europe. They are adapting this tradition to American needs by their insistence on training plus learning, skills plus intellect, an introduction to the work of the world acquired hand in hand with what we might call ‘the uphill thinking faculty.’ Hence they offer a type of education for life in America not generally obtainable elsewhere; and their task in the post-war period will be an essential one. They are striving to carry out the purpose which Georges Duhamel has called ‘the closing of the tragic gap between thinking and doing.’ They believe stoutly in a cultural medium of study for the lowest third in the high schools of today; they have something to offer our children even if they cease their education with the school diploma. And at the other end of the academic line they are anticipating the material of a college freshman year, whether you choose to call it postgraduate or juniorcollege work. They understand that ‘culture’ can no longer be defined in the sense in which it was formerly used — as primarily an armchair, artistic, æsthetic medium. They know that it means today the arts and crafts, the machinery, the language symbols, the ways of living, the leisure recreations of a community. It must have a common medium of exchange; and to find this medium, acceptable to educated persons of all income groups, is a primary task of the private school, free from local or state legislation except in certain obvious fundamentals. It is proper to equip boys and girls with a culture which both Matthew Arnold and Thomas A. Edison would appreciate.
Their religious education is broad and varied — from the parochial type, to the Sacred Studies of the church boarding school curriculum, to the meetings in Friends’ schools which are often conducted by the pupils themselves. One notes volunteer Sunday-school teaching in many neighborhoods, and Y.M.C.A. groups conducted in near-by towns. We can take pride in camps for underprivileged children, where seventeen-year-old counselors from the private schools serve under expert direction. Trips for the purpose of observing labor conditions at first hand are numerous.
Secondly, the private schools are at liberty to encourage the widest possible circulation of unfettered ideas, both in the classroom and outside, questioning their own policies in complete academic freedom. A recent report from the Council of Learned Societies recommends a greater understanding and discussion of major issues — what lies behind Soviet Russia, or the China of Hu Shih, or the causes of our errors in dealing with South America, or the symptoms of the disease which has perverted the totalitarian pow - ers. These topics are no less important than the statistics of the social scientist or the laboratory results of the physicist. The flexible program of the progressive schools has played a considerable part in this opening of the adolescent mind and has reacted upon all secondary teaching. By such procedures the book becomes alive. Through such topics of discussion, pulp-magazine trash is staved off and good taste is formed. If and when such boys are drafted, it cannot be said of them, as an Army general declared about the draftees recently examined, that one quarter of them had not reached the equivalent of a fourth-grade educational level.
The majority of private schools are now presenting a curriculum made up of 75 per cent of standard material where ‘meat courses’ are continuous and are taught in an up-to-date way, and of 25 per cent of vocational work geared either to national defense purposes or to the future profession of the student. Two examples may suffice. One student whose application for college is in hand has been prepared for junior class standing in the humanities; and another has submitted to the Committee on Scholarships a victrola record made by himself in his own laboratory, in which he gives an account of his experiments and presents his case. Languages are being taught on a realistic basis; art teaching satisfies the creative instinct without being too abstract; English is correlated with the cub reporter’s ambitions; the scientific boy not only gets a thorough training in mathematics but studies practical mechanics. Biology is adapted to the needs of the future farmer or bacteriologist. The skill of the craftsman is cross-fertilizing with the ideas of the student. Thus there is a transition from the emergency procedures of the present to the permanent apprenticeships of the reconstruction period. The gradual disappearance of the playboy, partly as a result of these programs and partly for national economic and military reasons, is a plain fact: in a university which this year draws approximately 50 per cent of its entering freshmen from private and 50 per cent from public schools, the proportion of candidates from both categories for graduation honors has risen from 20 to 50 per cent in the last twenty years.
To the dispassionate observer, then, the tax-supported schools and the private schools complement each other. In the emergency each has its function, the former dealing in large community groups and the latter in smaller units. Each will cut down the nonessentials; both will produce leaders, as in the past. Their policy will be one of integration and unity. College preparation will occupy the independent school to a proportionately greater extent. But a wider responsibility for pioneering, for experimentation with new ideas and imponderables, will be the privilege of the private school. Each in its way will have a spiritual aim. But, in the words of Headmaster Norman B. Nash, ‘it is our conviction that neither the democratic nor the totalitarian state can be safely trusted with a monopoly in education, since a precious fact of true education is the freedom for critical study and the evaluation of society as it is. The independent schools, like the independent institutions of higher learning, are not less necessary, but more. It is therefore not a matter of educational theory, but a way of living and thinking. It is more than bookkeeping or statistics or tests or schedules. It is imaginative reason feeding into the skills and procedures of adult life.’