The Old Schools
School, as opposed to learning on the farm or apprenticeship in town, has its roots in formal religious training: catechism, academy, collegium, university---a disciplined influence with emphasis on booklearning, ever present in today's classrooms.
In the "modern" era---after the French Enlightenment and the great social revolutions and characterized by Church divorced from State---there was a pressing need for secular education for the new leaders from the demos, the People. Hence the proliferation of one-room schoolhouses in the New World and, in the Old, among other things, the strengthening of venerable institutions such as academies or what are called in England the "Public Schools". Add to this the consequences of the Industrial Revolution and the need for a trained citizenry, armed with technical knowledge---and 19th century "education" now meant the transmission of moral values, mental skill, the vocabulary of national culture and the dogma of the powerful new "sorcery" of science.
The pragmatic flavor of modern education links it closely with other forms of 19th-century "Enlightenment", illustrated by the efforts of Florence Nightingale in the medical field, by Henry Dunant's "international societies for assistance to the war wounded" on the battlefield, by Jane Addams' "social work" in the slums of Chicago. It is this connection between 19th century idealism and pragmatism which lies at the root of what was to turn ambulance drivers into educators.
The vast majority of the first drivers----who were later to become prime movers for AFS's foray into the field of education---had themselves been educated at what are called "independant" or "preparatory" schools, located mostly in New England--- boarding schools which bore the stamp of the Public Schools of Old England.
Well is it for their mutual comprehension if the Englishman refrain from mention of National or British schools, and the American remain reticent as to academies and normal schools. Still, when the American has taken in the idea that such famous institutions as Rugby, Harrow, Eton, and Winchester, which the Englishman will persist in styling public, are in their intent, at least, paralleled here by the academies of Exeter and Andover, and the schools of Saint Paul's, Saint Mark's, and others of their type, he will not find much difficulty in translating his own phrase of "normal school or college" into "Training School for Schoolmasters," or "Schoolmistresses," as the case may be. And by the time the Englishman has perceived the points of likeness between certain American academies and Harrow or Eton, the American is prepared to receive with meekness the information that a National school is one supported by the national or Established Church, and a British school, which one might fancy to be even more "national," is one sustained by two or more bodies of nonconformists, in distinction from one supported by a single body, such as a Unitarian or Wesleyan school.
Speaking broadly, then, by the term "public school," the Englishman means to indicate an institution preparatory to the university, having Eton, Rugby, or some other famous name in mind. Schools parallel in their intent, and to some extent in their plan, have existed in the United States for considerably more than a century under the general term of academies in some instances, or private schools in others, but it is since the close of the American Civil War, in 1865, that they have become a more influential factor in American education. Where one such institution existed prior to that year, twenty may be counted now. The necessity for their presence, by no means generally recognized scarce a generation ago, is willingly enough conceded at present.
Oscar Fay Adams. Some Famous American Schools. Boston: Dana Estes, 1903.
All too soon for the English boy of the aristocracy or of wealthy middle- or upper-middle class, the Public School was to be a "home away from home". This institution was a world unto itself, with classroom buildings presided over by "masters", arranged around courtyards, surrounded by playing fields and the living quarters--- dormitories---often organized into "houses", each with its own identity, ruled by a "housemaster", and managed by a "matron."
Public School boys wore uniforms---from the ecclesiastic robes of Charterhouse to Sunday's tails and striped trousers, complete with tightly-rolled umbrella, at Uppingham. They were self-policed---by a corps of "prefects," drawn from the ranks of older boys, whose status was marked by the right to wear a boater or wield a cane.
Although the comparison is tempting, it would not be fair to call the Public School monastic, for it was preparing its charges for Life, not necessarily for further training, religious or secular, at the university. The monk, for example, is a contemplative----giving himself over to meditation and prayer. The schoolboy, needless to say, is an active-----and it is often on the playing fields that he learns his most important lessons.
Each Public School shaped its pupils: speech, discipline, manners, dress. It bestowed upon them an identity which forever stamped them "Public School"----Eton, Harrow, Rugby, Arundel, Winchester, Charterhouse...the list is long. Upon graduation, they became Old Boys, members of a confraternity, a "tribe" as Peterson's puts it. Which tribe? The old school tie, worn proudly----or the school colors---- sends the signal to those in the know.
In this day and age it has become almost mandatory for intelligent people to look upon the "old school tie" with scorn, but I'm here to say that no matter what you say about the English public school system, it has given some otherwise quite ordinary people an extra sense of obligation to "never let down the side" (I am not using the phrase facetiously), which has proved invaluable to the British Empire.
Bravery is a strange thing. It is quite possible for an ordinary soldier to go on fighting, even though he may be wet with fear, because he has a self-imposed obligation not to let down his comrades---his own self-respect depending upon the respect of others. How much more possible, then, for a man to go on fighting if he has not only this primary obligation but also a greater one to which he has been bred and conditioned.
Of course, not all British officers are public school products, and I don't mean to imply that it takes a public school education to make a good officer. I do mean that in wartime the "old school tie" can be of real value in elevating a group which might not otherwise be at all exceptional.
Evan Thomas. Ambulance to Africa. New York: Appleton. 1943.
Preparatory Schools
Roster of AFS drivers of 1915-1917 listing a secondary school affiliation only
In "Puritan" New England, it is not surprising that so many of the American versions of the English Public School were begun as "church" schools---or that all, religiously-oriented or not, should continue to stress education of the "moral" man--- while the enforced separation of Church and State made this increasingly difficult within the system of public high schools. Nonetheless, in outward form at least, by the time that future AFS drivers attended them, most of these boarding schools had been "defrocked" and were following their British counterparts in the education of not "godly men" but "gentlemen".
The Duke's voice interrupted what must, by now, have become a blank stare. "These little things are like icebergs. Only the tip usually shows. What you don't see can be deadly. It can bring a lot of ships down, including your own. How can I be sure it isn't going to happen to you? How can I be sure there aren't all sorts of other things submerged within you, waiting to breach the surface?" The Duke looked at me intently, and I averted my eyes. "You're the last person from whom I would have expected something like this. It's a bad attitude to take with you, no matter where you go. It simply is not something that a gentleman would do."
Be a gentleman! That was the only rule, the Duke always liked to say, that the school truly had. It was a cardinal rule, and I had apparently broken it. I wanted to slither under the table and somehow disappear. It was surely the worst moment of my life...
Ernest Kolowrat. Hotchkiss. A Chronicle of an American School. New Amsterdam Press. 1992.
In the best of English traditions, the American gentleman was above all a sportsman---although he did not ride to hounds or play cricket. There were a number of native sports, as well as English imports, to absorb the energies of young boys, to shape characters, to provide all-important experience in teamwork----but football reigned supreme. Football came to represent the school itself, to carry its name, its colors on the fields of honor. Football heros, modern knights, earned the esteem which, in the British Public School house system, was reserved for the prefects.
The football season yielded six victories, a tie with Milton, and two defeats; but one of the last was by Groton, with a score of seventeen to nothing. Captain Galatti, following Biddle, had shown a spirit similar to his predecessor's, and the record was the best for five years. The game with the superior Groton team was hard and clean, and in spite of defeat a credit to St. Mark's; and to the continued interest of Galatti, particularly in the last five years, football at the School owes a debt which it would be hard to overestimate.
Albert E. Benson. History of Saint Mark's School. 1925.
"To be a gentleman, to be a person of character---that is the most important thing we can teach you here," Van Santvoord often told his boys. In his notes and in his office sessions, the Duke kept stressing character; how we must always be on guard that we do and say only those things that are truly worthy of a gentleman---regardless of whether anyone finds out or we get caught. We owe it to others, the Duke wrote, to do what is truly right. And, above all, we owe it to ourselves. For only that way can we truly live with ourselves in peace. A gentleman was defined by his strength of character.
Though he never came right out and said so, George Van Santvoord was emphasizing the true standards of a true aristocracy---standards of cultivation, of intellect, of duty, of generosity of spirit, standards of doing one's best. The fact is that out of schools like Groton and Hotchkiss, out of even the most hothouse-seeming notions of how the children of the American rich should be educated, would emerge people who, when the chips were down, would manage to rise to occasions and do the things that were expected of them. It is as though this instinct had been somehow absorbed by osmosis from the attitudes of parents, or grandparents, or teachers, or a combination of all these influences. It is as though service in a time of need were an almost atavistic response, the way an English gentleman will sit for hours waist-deep in the icy waters of a duck blind on the chance of bringing down a single bird, not because he enjoys it so much but because his family and friends all do it, have always done it, and it is the thing that, if one is an English gentleman, one does.
Stephen Birmingham, "What Made Maria Do It?" in Ernest Kolowrat. Hotchkiss. A Chronicle of an American School. New Amsterdam Press. 1992.
Above all, the business of the boarding school was to prepare its charges for life in American colleges, and particularly for the prestigious Ivy League schools, such as Harvard, Yale, Dartmouth and Princeton---the bastions of "liberal" education.
Liberal Culture, a conservative educational movement, held that the main purpose of a university or college was not to advance knowledge (although as a byproduct that was commendable) or to directly uplift the majority of the populace, but rather to produce an educated elite of gentlemen. When Charles Eliot Norton wrote that, "the ideal university is the training-place of the wisest, strongest, and best men..." he was saying that it should produce gentlemen. The training of those "wisest, strongest, and best men" naturally included a wide range of subjects; yet, more important than the subjects was the moral framework in which they were embedded. Dean Briggs of Harvard, a proponent of Liberal Culture, admitted this when he wrote that higher education's "unwritten and unspoken purpose is not so much intellectual as moral; and her [the college's] strongest hope is to stamp her graduate with abiding character." That character was upper-class in nature. The moral code was an aristocratic one, since the idea of the gentleman, as Charles William Eliot noted, was derived "in good part from the days of chivalry." Eventually it was the upper-class ideal of the gentleman in all its ramifications-- intellectually, spiritually, morally, and physically, that would motivate the young men reared in the tradition of Liberal Culture to join the ambulance services.
James T. Lapsley III. Gentlemen Volunteers. American Ambulance Drivers in the First World War. (Master's thesis at UC Santa Cruz, 1971).
Hotchkiss The Hotchkiss School bears the name of its founder, Maria Bissell Hotchkiss:
Did someone then suggest to Maria that, as a former schoolteacher, a more appropriate gift from her might be in the field of education, rather than highway construction? No one knows, but Maria's next thought was to establish a school for children who were feebleminded, the noneuphemistic term of that more straightforward era. A number of her late husband's factories in Connecticut and New York had employed children in menial tasks on the assembly line. If the feebleminded could be trained in certain trades and taught to perform rote chores, Maria would be educating a useful labor force.
At this point, with Maria's thoughts turning toward the idea of a school, the redoubtable Timothy Dwight, president of Yale, entered the picture. Dwight was a commanding figure of his era, described by a contemporary as the unofficial Congregational Pope of New England. His grandfather, another Timothy Dwight, had been president of Yale during the American Revolution, and his grandfather had been the legendary Jonathan Edwards, whose descendants have included no fewer than thirteen college presidents, three of Yale alone. On the distaff side, through the daughters of Jonathan Edwards and his wife, have descended other American men of eminence, including two presidents, Grant and Cleveland, and Supreme Court Chief Justice Morrison Waite. With this pantheon of ancestors and cousins arrayed about him, few people disputed the ideas of Timothy Dwight, especially when this tall, black-frocked Yankee patrician deigned to appear in person, as he did when he came to reason with Maria Hotchkiss. And Timothy Dwight's idea for this wealthy widow was to finance a school that would prepare young men for college --- for Yale, to be precise.
But still Maria seemed unconvinced. Her Yankee disposition was not to be easily impressed. When she learned that Dwight had a private boys school in mind, she also reputedly protested that she did not want to build "a school for the pampered sons of rich gentlemen." A free high school or an academy was more in line with her ideals. Not until the Yale president assured her that deserving boys from the surrounding communities would receive free tuition did Maria finally relent --- and agree to provide the wherewithal to establish the school.
Stephen Birmingham, "What Made Maria Do It?" in Ernest Kolowrat. Hotchkiss. A Chronicle of an American School. New Amsterdam Press. 1992.
While serving America's elite, Hotchkiss was not a closed system:
Endicott Peabody and other educators of that ilk may also have been responding to a subtler reality of the times, namely, that the sons of aristocratic, wealthy, or otherwise notable families were likely to inherit power regardless of their educational background. The implicit responsibility of institutions such as Groton and Harvard or Hotchkiss and Yale was to prepare these boys to wield that inherited power in the most constructive and enlightened way. As one current witticism put it, "The dimmer the boy, the more urgent the task." And the sooner this educational process was started, the better the chance of overcoming any of the natural tendencies in boys to resist such edification. Just as Yale and Harvard were looking to the likes of Hotchkiss and Groton to prepare and premold their candidates, so these prep schools were now looking to feeder schools of their own. One of the first on the prepreparatory level was Fay, founded in 1866 with grades one through eight. Similar schools followed, including Allen Stevenson in 1883, Fessenden in 1903, St. Bernard's in 1904, Buckley in 1913, Harvey in 1916, and, beyond the Northeast, most notably St. Louis Country Day in 1917. A boy starting out in the first grade at one of these schools could virtually count on progressing through the system to a diploma from Yale, Harvard, Princeton, or some other elite college of his choice. Those falling by the wayside for disciplinary reasons would usually find another path open to them within that same system. Boys expelled from Hotchkiss, for instance, would often be granted sanctuary at Deerfield or Choate.
Yet it was not an entirely closed system. At various junctures, this special path to influence had openings for boys from beyond the small circle of privilege. Scholarship programs provided entry to a limited number of needy boys, whether the deserving sons of missionaries or teachers, or of single mothers impoverished through widowhood or divorce, or from other families of character but modest means --- or just boys who happened to be qualified in some particular way. But the objective was far broader than to benefit merely the recipients. As Frank H. Hamlin '24 has observed, "A lot of the rich and famous sent their sons to Hotchkiss partly because they would be pretty sure of getting into Yale, Harvard, or Princeton, and partly because they would be closely associated with the bright sons of the non-rich who were there on scholarship."
Ernest Kolowrat. Hotchkiss. A Chronicle of an American School. New Amsterdam Press. 1992.
In 1947, when Hotchkiss Headmaster George Van Santvoord offered a "scholarship" to a foreign student, he was simply carrying on the practice of bringing deserving "outsiders" into in America's "prep" schools ---for the benefit of all. Moreover, Hotchkiss had its own tradition of inviting "outsiders" into its midst, not just scholarship students, but boys with vastly different perspectives:
Perhaps it was Dr. Buehler's big heart, combined with his affinity for the famous, which exposed the entire school to a lecture that was as disturbing as it was edifying. The speaker was Jacob Riis, a Danish-born former newspaperman who had spent a quarter of a century as a police reporter on the New York Sun. [...]
Though startlingly graphic in its presentation, the message Jacob Riis brought to Hotchkiss was not an unusual one: the responsibility of the more fortunate members of society to lend a helping hand to those in need. This was one of the implicit premises on which Hotchkiss had been founded, and already back in 1894 the school's St. Luke's Society was raising funds and collecting clothes for a nearby retreat for destitute boys with "marked criminal tendencies." Such charitable acts were not only part of being a "good Christian, but represented the sometimes neglected noblesse oblige aspect of being a gentleman. [...]
The standard which Jacob Riis implicitly put before the school in his lecture in 1908 was to do something about those city slums. By the following summer, a program was launched to do just that. Eighteen boys, variously referred to in the Record as "urchins" and "street boys," were brought to Hotchkiss from the Lower East Side tenements of New York for two weeks of "sunshine and happiness." That was the beginning of what came to be known as the Riis Camp. Fortified by hearty fare in the dining room, the campers engaged in day-long out door activities, supervised by Hotchkiss boys who had volunteered to postpone their vacations and stay behind at the school. Others contributed clothes, athletic goods, and money to make the camp self-supporting. Soon, the Riis Camp was running double sessions and averaging a total of about forty boys each summer. "The days are spent in outdoor work, tennis and baseball being the chief sports," reported the Record in 1911. "Twice a day the boys go down to the lake for a swim. Sometimes a few fish are caught.... We may easily see how much pleasure the little fellows find in their outing by the fact that two of them made their way back here just to see the fellows and the place where they had such a good time."
During the school year, Hotchkiss boys were engaged in similar endeavors closer to home. On the other side of Lake Wononscopomuc across from the school was Ore Hill, which had provided much of the raw material some years before for the Hotchkiss family's munitions business. Inhabited by miners' families, many of them now unemployed, Ore Hill represented the proverbial other side of the railroad tracks. A collection was regularly taken up in the school chapel to help the more destitute of these families. After hearing one such case dramatized by Mr. Estill before a Sunday offering, several Hotchkiss boys became interested. They investigated the conditions on Ore Hill and came up with a plan that would bring together boys from the two opposing hills. They secured permission to use an abandoned schoolhouse and founded the Ore Hill Club. According to the Record, "1908 was the first year of this club, and in that year Hotchkiss boys went to the old school building and played games with the Ore Hill fellows or took musical instruments, making the evenings so jolly that every one had a good time. These gatherings proved such a success that every one at Ore Hill and Hotchkiss agreed that the one thing to do was to erect a permanent building for a club house. This was a rather expensive proposition, but Hotchkiss boys, Hotchkiss alumni, together with a few kind friends in Lakeville, made the plan possible."
The Ore Hill Club and the Riis Camp were to remain a part of the Hotchkiss scene for years to come. This did not mean that Hotchkiss was brimming with altruistic goodwill. It took a concerted effort to keep these relatively modest endeavors going.
Ernest Kolowrat. Hotchkiss. A Chronicle of an American School. New Amsterdam Press. 1992.
In 1940, Hotchkiss opened its doors to a group of English boys:
By the time Bill Bryan was graduating in 1939, World War II was beginning to engulf the world. In Europe, Hitler had violated the Munich Accords by marching into Czechoslovakia, and then launched his blitzkrieg against Poland. The following year France fell to the Fuehrer without resistance.
There was now serious concern on the other side of the channel that Britain would be next. Among the defensive measures under consideration in bomb-beleaguered London was sending large numbers of children to safety in the United States. One of those involved in this project was Arthur L. Goodhart '08, a noted teacher of jurisprudence and the first American to be named as master of an Oxford college. The following handwritten letter to the Duke from his former classmate needs no elaboration:
Aug. 26, '40
Dear George,
Thank you so much for your letter of July 13th. I am glad that Hotchkiss is taking some of the English boys. I doubt whether many more will be coming over, especially those of school age. There is a growing feeling here that too much emphasis can be placed on safety, and that everyone ought to be in the same boat. There is also the danger of submarines which, although not large, seems to be as real as that from aeroplanes. The astonishing success of the R.A.F. during the past two weeks has been most encouraging, although at no time was there ever a feeling of depression here.... It would take a tremendous number of aeroplanes to do serious damage to London, especially if they have to come over at night. [...]
Ever yours,
Arthur GoodhartErnest Kolowrat. Hotchkiss. A Chronicle of an American School. New Amsterdam Press. 1992.
Finally, Ernest Kolowrat gives this insight into the perspectives of the headmaster of Hotchkiss who opened AFS's door for students from "elsewhere" to come into America's secondary schools:
After World War II, I was attending a boarding school in England when my father resigned as a Czech diplomat at the time of the Communist coup in Prague in 1948. Among his American colleagues was a friend of a Sharon resident, Admiral Thomas Hart. Admiral Hart conveyed to the Duke the story of our family's situation --- with the result that only days after arriving in New York, my older brother and I found ourselves at Hotchkiss. The Duke enrolled us on the spot, neither asking for transcripts nor giving us any tests. "I don't want you worrying about the tuition fees," I remember the Duke telling Father. "I am instructing our bursar, Mr. Brooks, to consider as payment in full whatever you are able to pay. And I shall let you be the judge of that. If it turns out you can't afford anything right now --- well, we have other boys here on full scholarships. It won't be anything unusual. "
The Duke's voice was matter-of-fact, as if he were merely doing what anyone in his place would. Years later, when I tried to thank him during tea at his Vermont Shadowbrook Farm, his forehead became slightly tinged with pink and he puffed on his pipe several times. "But you really have nothing to thank us for," he finally said, in that same matter-of-fact tone. "We took you in because we simply wanted to see what we could learn from you."
Ernest Kolowrat. Hotchkiss. A Chronicle of an American School. New Amsterdam Press. 1992.
* * *
Bibliography Oscar Fay Adams. Some Famous American Schools. Boston: Dana Estes, 1903.
"The academy age," says a recent writer, "was, in fact, the age of transition from the partially stratified Colonial society to modern democracy. The rise of the academies was closely connected with the rise of the middle class. The academies were by no means exclusively middle-class schools at the start, and they became something very different from that at a later period." But from the dawn of the nineteenth century till its fiftieth milestone was passed, the academy was the dominant educational institution in America.
The academy as it was then has had its day and ceased to be, and the institutions that yet preserve the name are in most cases quite different from the average academy of two generations ago, with different aims and more comprehensive methods. The few great modern academies whose names come readily to the mind have approached year by year more nearly to the model furnished by the great public schools of England, and with them are classed such similar institutions in scope and general plan, as Saint Paul's, Saint Mark's, Lawrenceville, and some others that might be named in this connection. These various institutions agreeing in their central aim, that of providing a broad base for the university education that is to follow, have yet preserved a distinctive individuality, and, with many points of resemblance,. present as many, and perhaps as interesting and instructive, points of unlikeness, also. Of a few of these great middle schools it falls within the province of this volume to speak in more or less discursive fashion.
Peterson's 1999-2000 Guide to Private Secondary Schools, 1999.
"From their earliest beginnings, there has been a religious or moral telios that has shaped both the curriculum and traditions of almost all of these institutions. They are not shy about their cultivation of the examined life and the membered life. From generation to generation, students have been recognizable as having a distinctly Holton or Roxbury Latin or Hotchkiss or Westlake education. The very names conveyed a sense of who the products of these schools were. Like families or tribes, they were marked by a sense of origin and even by a sense of destiny not relegated to college and career expectations, alone."
E.E. Reynolds Baden-Powell. A Biography, 1942.
Charterhouse School was still in London in 1870 when B.-P. joined the school as a Gownboy Foundationer. A contemporary described him at this period as 'a boy of medium size, curly red hair, decidedly freckled, with a pair of twinkling eyes that soon won friends for him'. Three years previously an Act of Parliament permitted removal, and Dr. Haig Brown had chosen a site at Godalming where the first sod was turned on Founder's Day (1 December) 1869. It was not until 1872 that the new buildings were occupied. B.-P. therefore had the benefit of two years in the ancient London buildings with all that they meant in tradition; there famous Carthusians such as Steele and Addison, John Wesley and Thackeray had been educated. In The Newcomes the last immortalized the pensioners or 'Old Codds' who shared with the boys the benefits of Thomas Sutton's foundation. Those last two years in the old buildings (now bombed to ruins) must have had all the stimulus of any period of transition. The figure of Haig Brown --- well called the second Founder of Charterhouse --- dominated all.
He had a genius for governing boys and something of his methods remained indelibly impressed on the mind of the observant new Gownboy. The boys were given an unusual measure of independence and responsibility, for he was no lover of rules and regulations. He relied on a thorough personal knowledge of each boy for guidance, not on any preconceived theory of education; each boy was a personality to be respected as such. His teaching in his sermons was direct and simple, and the most memorable were studies of Old Testament characters. He did not encourage intellectual difficulties, but felt that during boyhood plain directions for decent living were more important as a foundation for after life. With this was linked a quickness of wit which has become legendary. His repartees were famous. To one parent who said he wished his son 'interred' at the school, he promptly replied that he would be glad to 'undertake' the boy. And a lady who asked him if all the boys were the sons of gentlemen was informed that 'we do not include the education of the parents'.
Albert E. Benson. History of Saint Mark's School. 1925.
"St. Paul's, the first Church School in New England, was founded in 1855, when the older endowed schools were beginning to lose in numbers because of the increased facilities of the high schools; and ten years later it was difficult to obtain a place in it without patient waiting. Mr. Burnett had sent his eldest son, Edward, to St. Paul's; and Dr. Coit, the Headmaster, suggested to him when he was entering another son, Harry, that, as he had four boys it would be a good thing to start a church school in Massachusetts. Thus the words of Dr. Coit and the success of St. Paul's undoubtedly suggested to Joseph Burnett the possibility of another school on the same plan; and his own large family of boys nearing the school age brought him to serious consideration of the matter, as had been the case with Dr. Shattuck and St. Paul's. It is probable that in the words descriptive of Southborough which are found for many years in the School catalogue, "healthful," and "singularly free from objectionable features," we have his own perception of the fitness of Southborough for such an important venture. "
Claude Fuess. Phillips Academy Andover in the Great War. 1919.
"Andover Hill in the spring of 1917 seemed little different in architecture or landscape from what it had been in the years immediately preceding. The great spreading elms still reached aloft to form the stately arch which remains the school's most distinguishing feature; the buildings, oddly combining the antique and the modern, the ugly and the graceful, nevertheless blended picturesquely to form a scene which will always have about it much that is romantic; the level lawns and playing-fields stretched out in wide expanse, and beyond them, across the valleys, one could still catch glimpses of the immemorial hills. Externally the old Academy stood apparently immutable, unaffected visibly by time or circumstance. Brick and mortar, trees and ridges, do not change readily; only decades, or some mighty convulsion of nature, can effect transformations that endure.
"Yet there was a real change, of a kind that comes but seldom in a century and then only because of a disturbance in the hearts of men. One felt it in the air, or caught its echoes even before he had mounted the Hill. A new force, spiritual but yet dynamic, was making cheeks glow and pulses beat more rapidly. It led the historian to hark back to that day, more than one hundred and thirty-nine years before, when, while the nation, hardly born, was struggling for very existence, the school too had come into being, cradled in the midst of the passions of war. Now that nation, grown to maturity, was once more engaged in a contest for human liberty; and the men of Phillips Academy, a national institution, were reincarnating the virtue of its founders. With that zeal which a righteous war alone can inspire, the school of Samuel Phillips, Revolutionary patriot, was preparing its sons to battle with Apollyon. "
Ernest Kolowrat. Hotchkiss. A Chronicle of an American School. New Amsterdam Press. 1992.
"Chronologically, Hotchkiss is about in the middle of the pack. Among the first to articulate the purpose of these schools was Samuel Phillips, who wrote that it was his "chief concern to see to the regulation of [the boys'] morals" by "early diligently painting in the purest simplicity the Deformity and Odiousness of VICE, [and] the Comeliness and Amiableness of VIRTUE." With that in mind, he founded in 1778 Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts. Three years later another member of the family established, in Exeter, New Hampshire, a second Phillips Academy. Andover and Exeter were followed by the founding of such schools as Lawrenceville in 1810, The Hill in 1851, St. Paul's in 1855, St. Mark's in 1865, and Groton in 1884. Though differing in emphasis and approach, these schools shared the goal of instilling in their boys a pristine blend of Christian values, an aristocratic noblesse oblige, and a Darwinian self-reliance abounding in all sorts of manly virtues. "To develop what was good in boys," is how the founder of St. Paul's, George Shattuck, described his mission, "[and] to discourage and check what was evil; to train & educate all their powers; mental, physical and moral." And the best way to accomplish this was to have the boys placed together in country settings, away from the distractions and temptations of the cities and under the constant supervision of "masters." Through a combination of inspiration, persuasion, and an assortment of unforgettable personality quirks, these masters would seek to work their magic on their unruly charges in the classrooms, in the dormitories, and, increasingly, on the playing fields. The goal was to bring forth in the boys their most desirable characteristics while preparing them for leadership roles. Another way of saying that: Moniti Meliora Sequamur. Derived from Vergil's Aeneid, this motto was included in the bylaws approved by the Connecticut legislature in establishing the tax-exempt Maria H. Hotchkiss School Association. Even Mr. Coy's elegant translation, "Let growing wisdom guide us to better ways," falls short of conveying all that the motto implied.
"Hotchkiss opened its doors in 1892 as part of a greatly accelerated trend which saw the establishment of such schools as Taft in 1890, Choate and St. George's in 1896, Salisbury in 1901, Kent in 1906, and Berkshire in 1907. Ironically, what contributed to this spurt in private schools was the unprecedented expansion in public education during the latter part of the nineteenth century. The increasing availability of "free" high schools in effect put out of business many of the small academies which had been the pride of towns and villages throughout the Northeast. As semiprivate day schools, these academies had produced some top-notch applicants for the leading colleges that would become known as the Ivy League. Many college presidents, among them Timothy Dwight, now feared that the public high schools, because of their massive scale and bureaucratic structure, would not be able to do the job that had been done by the displaced academies. 'The Hotchkiss School is the outgrowth of the conviction that the interests of higher education call for more and better secondary schools,' reads the preamble to the school's first handbook. "
