Palpable Hits

The late rector of St. Paul's School was a man whose voice was sonorous and whose sentiments had style. St. Paul's boys, who called him "The Drip" long before that phrase had its present teenage connotation, never took him to their hearts, but educators knew Dr. Samuel Smith Drury as a man whose broadsides usually struck home. His bustling, benign successor, the Rev. Dr. Norman Burdett Nash, has neither style nor sonority, but he too hits his target. Last week, speaking at the 50th anniversary celebration at Connecticut's Choate School, Dr. Nash took aim at a target he and his listeners knew well: the "independent" school (e.g. Choate, St. Paul's). Excerpts:

>On the need for teachers of "intellectual capacity [and] kindling personality": "They tell . . . of a sacred studies master who was trying to instill into the head of a rather dumb pupil the meaning of a certain parable, and he finally said, 'What is the matter with your brains, anyhow? The simple peasants of Galilee understood. . . .' And the boy floored him by answering, 'Yes, sir, but [they] had a pretty good teacher.' "

>On the need for a religious core: "The moral tradition of our society is quite obviously shattered. . . . Some of the schools [like St. Paul's] are going to continue to be frankly church schools, religious schools, which believe that the one solid foundation for morality is religious faith. . . ."

>On resisting pressures to make Willie an auto salesman in "the time gained by ignorance of Latin": "We are not vocational institutions [and] have no reason for undertaking to be. . . . When one turns to esthetic education I think most of us will have to admit our schools are still barbarous. . . . We have lost a great deal of ground since the 17th Century in the disappearance of the esthetic side. . . ."

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