Sprightly Schoolman

Between the red-&-gold covers of Porter Sargent's famed catalog of 4,000 private schools, many an undecided parent seeks an educational niche for his offspring. Schoolmasters browse through it to get information about their competitors. But Private Schools' readership is by no means confined to these two classes. Wiseacres know that practically anybody can find something to amuse and instruct him in this fascinating volume, whose 20th Anniversary Edition was published in Boston last week.

A lively, lean-faced, high-collared old New Englander is Porter Sargent, who as advertising and employment agent, adviser and critic, sits firmly astride the far-flung world of U. S. private secondary education. Although he has not willingly set foot in a school since, upon leaving Harvard in 1896, he taught a while at Cambridge's staid Browne & Nichols, Porter Sargent ranks today as the private school industry's No. 1 lay figure. As such, he annually delivers himself in Private Schools of a long and dogmatic preface on the worldwide State of Education, includes his sprightly, if iconoclastic, views on lots of other things. Excerpts from this year's 150-page sound-off:

"Once I collected definitions of education by great writers and others. It made a thick folder . . . beautifully sentimental. The safest generalization is that education is what we want to do to children, or to have done to them for us, which would make them more like us than they otherwise would be."

On Eugenics: "Hitler has inspirited his people just as Mussolini de-Wopped the Wops. Breeding has been encouraged, the birth rate has risen, and they are improving the quality. Here in this country ignorance and prejudice prevent improvement and largely restrict births to the less fit. . . ."

On Women: -"The desexed female bee workers throw the drones out and sting them to death. The white ants don't even trouble to rear them. Well, we have started on the way in our public school system. Once boys were taught by school masters. Now we insist on supposedly sexless females, and if they marry normally we throw them out."

These and other reflections, included in a volume which sells 100,000 copies at $6 apiece, emerge as regularly as the dogwood each spring from No. n Beacon Street, Boston. At that address is located Porter Sargent's crowded little office. There he, with an assistant and a half-dozen stenographers, besides publishing Private Schools, personally tells parents where to find schools, teachers where to find work, trustees where to find headmasters. He also places school advertising in magazines as well as in the rear of his yearly handbook.

Since part of Porter Sargent's bread-&-butter depends on the goodwill of U. S. private educators, he might normally be expected to betray a certain amount of mild toadyism. Yet such is not the case with this fanatically independent old man. He gives equal praise to those who do and do not use his service, throws protests straight into the wastebasket. Those institutions of which he does not approve come in for a sound flaying in Private Schools. Of Franklin D. Roosevelt's Groton, Mr. Sargent dryly observes: "It has brought nurture, intellectual pap, and a spirit of aristocratic democracy to leading and socially ambitious families, especially from New York." Through many an edition he has carried on his pet campaign against the "remoteness" of lordly Headmaster George van Santvoord, the "Duke" of Hotchkiss School. Of swank Miss Porter's, he notes that "girls still hear stilted talks on ethics by one of their number." Although Porter Sargent has circled the globe five times, he preserves a certain New England wonderment at the rest of the world. Much of the liveliest reading in Private Schools is furnished by his running comments on the U. S. Scene, ostensibly undertaken to provide parents with desirable geographical background information. Of his native city he realistically observes: "Boston is one of the world's choicest places of residence although its climate is harsh, its people aloof, and its government corrupt. . . . The aristocrats of Boston all left with Lord Howe. The old Boston families of today are for the most part derived from the rabble of smugglers and privateersmen who poured in as the Tories left with the British fleet."

Of Philadelphia: "The city has lent its name to cream cheese, scrapple, capon and a certain type of lawyer. . . ."

Of Wilmington, Del.: "For more than a century the Du Ponts and their products, gunpowder and its modern substitutes, have been first in war. But since recent Congressional investigations (and articles in FORTUNE), they are no longer first in the hearts of their countrymen."

Porter Sargent himself has chosen to live in suburban Brookline, Mass, whose "winding shaded roads provide a beautiful setting for many homes." His own is a 130-year-old farmhouse. A widower, he pressed no formal education on his two sons, let them roam free. The elder died two years ago while traveling alone in the Hudson Bay region in an airplane-fabric canoe. For Porter Jr., he suggested North Carolina's highly experimental Black Mountain College. Explains Porter Sargent Sr.: "Harvard practically ruined me."

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