"Good for the Soul"

> Andover and St. Mark's, for the first time in their history, will have a summer session this year. Subjects: body building, military studies.

> Choate this term started the first prep-school flight training course, already has twelve boys enrolled.

> Hotchkiss boys are helping Connecticut farmers plant and harvest their crops.

> Loomis boys have taken over taxi drivers' jobs.

> Roxbury Latin has asked parents of its day boys to restrict them to one helping of dessert and drive them only part way to school, so that they may "get the benefit of the mild exercise in climbing the hill."

One way or another, U.S. private preparatory schools last week were all doing their patriotic duty and getting themselves shipshape for war. So far they had weathered the storm well; only one or two weak sisters had foundered; enrollments and support were still high. But their hardheaded headmasters were caulking the seams and battening the hatches for a rough voyage.

Biggest immediate problem was a diminishing supply of teachers. Private school teachers' pay normally averages $1,200 a year; some get as little as $400 and maintenance. To keep themselves staffed, some of the better schools offered as much as $3,000; even so they were scraping the bottom of the barrel. When they hired married men to replace unmarried draftees, they had a housing headache: married men and their families could not live in boys' dormitories.

Many schools tightened their belts, have asked their boys to make their own beds, are getting along with fewer teachers and bigger classes. They have also introduced new courses helpful to the Army & Navy (e.g., radio, gas engines). The typical curriculum is now 75% cultural, 25% technical. Pondering their future, some even talked of asking for Government scholarships.

But few headmasters expect the sturdy old private schools to be a wartime casualty. In the May Atlantic Monthly, Andover's Headmaster Claude M. Fuess and Dr. Richard M. Gummere, Harvard's admissions chairman, ably put the private schools' case.

Describing Andover at War, Headmaster Fuess observes that the private schools themselves are among the free institutions for which the nation is fighting. Says he: "The combined resources of the great private schools . . . must be devoted during the next few months to the winning of the war. . . .

"I am not much concerned about the sanctity of the curriculum. . . . I find that impromptu classes are starting up all over the Hill in such fields as military history or geography. . . . This is all to the good. If it persists, we may find our boys actually eager for education. . . . Like everybody else, we are devising plans for curtailing expenses, eliminating waste, reducing the number of comforts and luxuries. All this helps the war, but is also good for the soul."

Though bedmaking may not be the foremost qualification for getting into Heaven, Dr. Gummere has a vision: that private schools, traditionally trail blazers in U.S. education, now have "a golden opportunity" to pioneer in teaching men how to combine culture and technology, reflection and action. Says he: "They are striving to carry out the purpose which Georges Duhamel has called 'the closing of the tragic gap between thinking and doing' . . . to equip boys and girls with a culture which both Matthew Arnold and Thomas A. Edison would appreciate."

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