School Wars – What Preppies Can Tell Us
One of the unforeseen consequences of the nation’s response to COVID has been the new and intense focus on the education of America’s children. The lockdowns put in place by governments around the country resulted in significant and irreparable damage to children who missed months, if not years, of in-person teaching. From a political perspective, teaching students via Zoom or other remote learning methods gave parents a first-hand look at what was their children’s daily curriculum. As a result, many parents were outraged by what they perceived to be the substitution of indoctrination and political dogma for the fundamentals of education.
The issue has devolved into a more basic, Manichean debate – who is better qualified, parents or teachers, to determine what is taught to our children with respect to certain hot-button topics, including, most controversially, sexuality and gender identity? On the one side, there are progressive Democrats who argue, as did gubernatorial candidate Terry McAullife, that “I don’t think parents should be telling schools what they should teach.” A more extreme expression of that sentiment was set forth in a recent New York Magazine article, entitled “Children are Not Property,” which likened parents’ desire to help shape their children through education to the breaking or stamping into shape of a domesticated animal. Even Joe Biden entered the fray when, quoting a teacher, he stated: "There is no such thing as someone else's child. No such thing as someone else's child. Our nation's children are all our children." These partisans believe that it is not the role of parents to determine the curriculum for their children, and term parents’ attempts to remove certain subjects from the purview of the school as censorship.
On the flip side are primarily conservatives and Republicans, who view many of the subjects taught as indoctrination, far removed from the mandate previously given to teachers – to provide students with fundamental knowledge and the tools to think critically. The views of these partisans have been manifested most famously in Florida’s so-called “Don’t Say Gay” bill, which prohibited the teaching of sexuality and gender identity to children from 5 to 8 years of age. These partisans believe that it is not the role of teachers to teach what they perceive as moral and social views to their children, particularly at such a young age.
Ironically, there was a time when conservative parents, or at least an important subset of them, willingly delegated the moral upbringing of their children to educators. They did so by sending their children to boarding schools, particularly in New England, where, removed from their family environment, young women, and more commonly, young men were shaped by a system whose traditions stretched back centuries. This was a conscious decision by parents who thought such schools, unfettered by parental interference, were better qualified to build young men and women of “character.”
The New England Prep Schools – Their Purpose
In 1987’s Preparing For Power, America’s Elite Boarding Schools, authors Peter Cookson and Caroline Persell engaged in a comprehensive study of how prep schools prepared their students for success in life. The authors noted that, while boarding schools originated in England, the germ for the idea for such schools originated elsewhere. According to the authors, the idea originally sprang from French philosopher Jean Jacques Rousseau, who was among the first to recognize the distinct phase in human development that adolescence represented. In his work, Emile or On Education, Rousseau posited that education civilized young people and that its purpose was not to permit the student to realize his natural self, but to socialize young people to become useful citizens. To Rousseau, adolescence was a critical point to reach young children, a “second birth” when a child is born into the world of independent life with his or her own values and virtues.
In Emile, Rousseau set forth what he prescribed as the ideal education for young men and women. He advocated plucking the student from his parents and his home and placing him in an isolated environment, free from contamination, to be tutored by knowledgeable and sensitive teachers. “Rousseau advocated an education where adolescents could develop free from the tyranny of unreasonable discipline, adult vice, and, perhaps, even the printed word.” It was not merely sufficient to isolate the student physically; students were to have their lives so highly structured that they did not have time for outside influences. As the 19th century, Swiss pedagogue, Emmanuel von Fellenberg, wrote: “The great art of educating consists of knowing how to occupy every moment of life in well-directed and useful activity of the youthful powers, in order that, so far as possible, nothing evil may find room to develop itself.”
Preparing for Power found that the 20th century prep school put into practice the strictures of Rousseau’s ideal education, combining physical and spiritual instruction with the more traditional education associated with schools. Cookson and Persell write that it was the core mission of the prep school to take students, particularly boys, “away from their mothers and [to] plac[e] them in barracks where their personal identities were stripped away.” The authors repeatedly emphasized the “stripping away of private self” that was the heart of the prep school experience:
By isolating students from their natural environment of family and community, the schools are also able to intervene in the adolescent growth process, the end result of which the schools hope will be intellectual and psychic transformation of their students. By stripping away the students’ private selves, they are more easily able to socialize them.
The isolation practiced by many schools was almost absolute. Unlike the prep schools of today, where many parents frequently visit on weekends, often to watch athletic contests, students saw their parents only on the one designated Parents’ Day. The school calendar began with a three-month period, from September to Thanksgiving, where the students did not go home at all except under special circumstances. This stretch to begin the year, which was longer than any other period of isolation throughout the remainder of the school calendar, was expressly intended to condition the student returning from a long summer vacation with his family. As one former preppie put it: “Our parents dropped us off at school in the ninth grade and returned at graduation to pick us up and drive us to college.”
While this isolation might prove helpful to the student’s educational progress by giving him focus and discipline, the true purpose of “stripping the private self” was to reinvent the student both socially and morally. For example, the avowed mission of St. Mark’s School (the school from which this author graduated in 1972) was to produce “Christian gentlemen.” As Cookson and Persell write:
The difference between a public school and an elite private school is, in one sense, the difference between a factory and a club. Public schools are evaluated on how good a product they turn out, and the measure of quality control is inevitably an achievement score of some kind. Public schools are not expected to educate the “whole child”— that is primarily the parents’ responsibility. Education for participation in public life is usually confined to civics classes and the daily Pledge of Allegiance. Most high-school principals probably feel that their students do too much “resonating” and not enough studying. Who knows how a school board would respond to a principal who suggested that the real mission of the school was to “build character,” or who proposed a faculty committee to study school “tone.”
This was in direct contrast to the New England prep school. Cookson and Persell compared the New England prep school to a seminary, where “novitiates learn the norms, values, and mores of their particular group,” and the intellectual and social environment is “regulated.” “In the seminary, the individual is submerged in the collective, and consciousness is molded by an unquestioned faith.”
In short, the purpose of the New England prep school was not just to prepare the student academically for college, although that was unquestionably the principal task for which it was selected. Of equal importance was the role the prep school played in preparing him for life. Parents were not only aware of this, but they were complicit in it – essentially abdicating their responsibilities for a period of four years to entrust the raising of their children to an institution hundreds of miles away.
Thus, whatever their political leanings, prep school parents of the past clearly fell on the teacher side of the parent/teacher debate. By their actions, they demonstrated that they believed that teachers, or the institutions where they taught, were best qualified, in loco parentis, to instill the character and values to prepare their children for adult life.
Parents’ willingness to entrust their children to these schools was premised on the belief that the schools were good at their job. The confidence entrusted in these schools by the parents was based in large part on the way the schools executed their mission.
New England Prep Schools – Their Methods
The unwillingness of parents today to entrust entirely the development of their children to professional educators is driven, to a great degree, by their belief that teachers are proselytizing to their children in ways in which the parents do not agree. In this regard, the debate is different from that which might have occurred 50 years ago.
However, of equal import to the political or philosophical differences that some parents may have with their schools, is the belief that the teaching of these controversial topics is accompanied by an intellectual flabbiness and lack of rigor that is equally damaging to their children. For example, disregarding the political agenda for curricula such as the 1619 Project, parents object to it in large measure because, in their view, its overarching thesis – that the American Revolution was fought to preserve slavery -- has absolutely no grounding in fact. Other controversial measures, such as Drag Queen Story Hour or graphic books about gender identity are notable, not just for their contentious content, but for their ham-handedness if not outright ineptness.
To be sure, the New England prep schools indoctrinated their students as well. However, they did so utilizing means that were far more subtle, and which produced students who were far more capable. The schools employed two tools. The first was intellectual and physical rigor, to the point of exhaustion. The other was the repeated use of ritual and tradition.
As to the former, the curriculum in most boarding schools was extremely demanding. It was based on the premise that young minds, particularly those of boys, were undisciplined and wild. “The only reliable antidote to mental flabbiness was a rigorous, regular regime of mental calisthenics. A boy who could not flawlessly recite long Latin passages was required to increase his mental workouts. Classical languages were to the mind what cold showers were to the body: tonics against waywardness.”
The first objective of that curriculum was a disciplined and trained mind. This was set forth in the description put forth by Groton in 1981:
The Groton curriculum is predicated on the belief that certain qualities of mind are of major importance: precise and articulate communication; the ability to compute accurately and to reason quantitatively; a grasp of scientific approaches to problem-solving; an understanding of the cultural, social, scientific, and political background of Western civilization; and the ability to reason carefully and logically and to think imaginatively and sensitively. Consequently the School puts considerable emphasis on language, mathematics, science, history, and the arts.
The curriculum was not as hidebound as modern critics would suggest, and frequently included heterodox writers such as Jack Kerouac and Rollo May.
The second, and equally important, objective of the curriculum was to keep the student’s mind busy, adhering to Von Kellenberg’s instruction to ensure that the student was occupied at all times. This objective was furthered by the external discipline imposed by the school. Students did not have access to a phone or a television except during designated periods. Students were required to be in their rooms most evenings with no talking or radios. If their grades fell, they were required to do their homework in a monitored study hall. Students had classes on Saturday. Prep school students had anywhere from twice to four times the homework as public school students.
Of equal importance in building the right “character” was the use of tradition and ritual. The purpose of ritual and tradition was to reduce the individualism of the student and to promote the collective. Students were instructed what to wear, when to study, when to relax, when to exercise, and when to sleep. As Cookson and Persell concluded: “Prep schools are hard places, where literally from dawn to dusk each person’s life is so regulated that freedom must be won by stealth.” They observed that the collective was emphasized in often imperceptible ways, noting, as an example, that in the chapel at Groton (as in the chapel at St. Mark’s), the students faced each other rather than the altar. When each student looks, dresses, and performs his tasks in the same manner as every other student, the individual is subsumed.
This combination of academic rigor and ritualized existence was essential to framing the character of young men. As British (and progressive) educator Royston Lambert wrote, in words equally applicable to New England prep schools:
The key to the [prep] school ethos is that its ends and means are one. Its values are embodied in a total social system; divesting its pupils of many of the roles and attributes they possess in the larger society, the school provides them with its own structure, role patterns, relationships, style and norms. It is in living out its subtle, complete and all-inclusive way of life that the values are so effectively and permanently imbibed.
Essential to such a school was an institutional self-confidence in the beliefs and values that the school imparted to its students. This self-confidence was based upon a track record of producing generations of capable students. It is unsurprising in this age of moral and philosophical relativism that such self-confidence is now found principally in religious schools. It is perhaps for this very reason that more doctrinaire religious schools are faring better than others.
The Current Debate
One suspects that many high school principals today would love to have the freedom to “build character” that was granted to their prep school peers of old. However, this freedom was always more illusory than it appeared. Parents, in sending their children to prep schools, did not relinquish control over how their children were to be educated and what they were taught. Instead, they chose experts to achieve the goals the parents wanted. Parents did not make this delegation in the dark. The very traditions and rituals that were an integral part of the boarding school experience provided a clear template for parents to make their decision. These schools earned the trust of parents.
The same cannot be said with respect to the school debate today, particularly with respect to public schools. Most importantly, parents do not choose their children’s school. Secondly, there is no “collective” at a public school, certainly not one that parents have chosen. It is hardly surprising that parents object to teachers’ efforts to impose of beliefs held, at most, by part of the class onto the whole of the class. Finally, it is not too harsh to say that schools have not earned the unquestioning trust of parents. Where, according to the New York Times, less than a third of eight graders read at grade level, and barely a quarter are proficient at math, it is hardly surprising that parents feel that teachers should focus more on the fundamentals.
It is perhaps for this reason that many wealthy progressives, who rail against “censorship” in the public schools, follow the pattern of their forebears and send their own children to traditional private schools, even though these schools have, for the most part, foresworn the traditions of their past. This site previously explored the class divide, analyzed by political scientist Charles Murray in his book, Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010. As he noted, the upper-class residents of Belmont practice the traditional values that they devalue with respect to the residents of Fishtown. They choose their own schools, yet criticize parents who have no choice. One suspects that very few residents of Belmont are subjecting their children to the curricula about which the residents of Fishtown are complaining.