This Month

ALL PARENTS will report at the gymnasium at 7.30 a.m. Saturday, March 10, for assignment to workdetails. The child (or children) of any parent tardy or absent will be punished severely. — NIRVANA HEIGHTS PARENTS ASSOCIATION. SIMONE J. LEGREE, PRESIDENT.

Such a notice — if the Nirvana Heights Country Day School were candid enough to couch its exactions in plain English — sums up in brief the relationship between parents and any good private school attended nowadays by their children. The belter the school, the more frequent and terse the notice will be. A collect telegram, “Report gymnasium immediately— Legree,” would be quite possible in a really successful school, and a Sunday or a business da y would be just as likely as a Saturday. The school commands, the parent must jump to it: into those fatigues, gel going, no excuses, and no nonsense about it, either.

The only worse thing than having children, in point of the unlimited liability thus imposed on the parent, is having children who attend a private school. There is nothing else quite like it, so expensive, so freighted with responsibility, so uncomfortable, tiring, incessant. Time was when maintenance of an ocean-going yacht or a racing stable or a big country place was one of the inescapable burdens of the rich. The really rich, who know they could never afford the demands of a private school and who intend to remain solvent, protect themselves by sending their children to public schools. But even the not so well-to-do are caught up in the private school’s dragnet by the device known as the “Parents Association.”

The Parents Association is what makes Country Day seem, to parents at any rate, like life in an ant palace: everyone tearing around madly — collecting, organizing, hoarding, working. It is all obligatory. Any parent, for instance, exempted (by presentation of a medical certificate) from folk dancing must nevertheless attend and feign a lively enjoyment in watching other parents folk-dance. Each parent must go to all meetings of the Association, remain awake throughout them,¹ and ask at least one question in the question period.

No parent is entitled to make any criticism of the school’s affairs. On the contrary, the parent must affirm, loudly, the perfection of all that it undertakes. (“I’ve always liked Iolanthe, but I’m frank to say that these kids — and with only a piano accompaniment, too —were just as good as anything that the D’Oyly Carte crowd ever pulled off. . . .”)

I myself, for asking why the children were not being instructed in the elements of English grammar, was set upon by masked assailants on my way home from a Parents Association mealing, and I escaped only by vigorous use of my sword-cane.

At the bottom of the heap, archdupe of them all, is the luckless parent who has accepted for his spawn a “scholarship” at Nirvana Heights Country Day. For each $500 rebate on the fees, a scholarship parent must return to the school at least $5000 in goods and services. His must be the choicest offerings for the “ bazaar,” his the basic vehicle in the car pool, his the most skillful hand with paintbrush, floor-sander, or upholsterer’s needle. Deprived of any time to earn his own living, the scholarship man remains permanently in need of the scholarship. Fifty scholarship parents, according to the recent report of a survey committee, are thus worth $225,000 a year to the school, equivalent to endowment income on some $6,000,000.

With fifty scholarship parents under its belt, the school moves in briskly on these and all others. There will be folk dancing (proceeds to the A.A.) Thursday at 8 — and decline if you dare. On Saturday, parents must attend the Big Game which Country Day will lose, traditionally, to detested Nirvana High School. Sunday morning at 11, a theologian conveniently borrowed from near-by Nirvana Junior College will lecture on Nature Worship in California (each parent must buy tickets for at least two guests, proceeds to apply on purchase of a now coffee urn for the Parents Association).

Throughout the week, all parents carry on their regular assignments of soliciting funds, door-to-door selling, chiseling wholesale prices for whatever the Parents Association is about to buy — prices that the Association’s Purchasing Review Committee will report later on were altogether too high — and reshingling the Barn and Carriage House. Whenever these activities seem to be played out, the school will decide to hold its Twentyseventh (or Thirty-first) Anniversary Celebration, and a new crusade is launched.

I know one mother who was ordered by her school to establish a literary agency to market the writings of ot her school parents, with the school gett ing a 50-50 split in the fees to the harddriven authors. Another parent sells neckties. Some conduct sight-seeing tours. Still another was bidden to set up an “entertainment bureau" which would provide “entertainers" — that is, parents—for parties and such, but alas, the parents were not sufficiently entertaining. A lecture bureau fared more fruitfully, doubtless because no one expects lectures to be entertaining. Heartened by this success, Country Day made a husband-wife team establish a booking office for movie films. Many schools have a wood lot where the parents are kept busy felling, hewing, and sawing (“Fit parents make a fit school!”); they sell the firewood around town, and as often as not to themselves — after, of course, they’ have filled the school’s bunkers.

The rummage sale is no longer quite the thing; it has been supplanted by a de luxe model in which parents — and others —are commanded to surrender such high-yield belongings as jewelry, furs, furniture, paintings, rare books, old gold and old cash. While one crew of parents is wresting these valuables from people in general, another is parading with placards advertising the sale.

For the children, as they confect their “mobiles” and daub thoir abstractions in the studio, it may very well be a Day School. But for the parents it seems to be a straightforward 24-hour proposition.