GOAL: "A DECENT GUY WHEN YOU'RE DONE

GOOD prep schools have in common one audacious aim: to be parent and teacher at the same time. To handle the parental role, they stress sports, discipline, manners, religion and democracy. To teach well, they accent intimate learning in classes that average nine students compared with the public school average of 28. Avoiding distractions, they generally offer spartan living on spacious, tradition-encrusted campuses, most of them in the Northeast. Despite these uniform methods, the schools that operate 24 hours a day come in all shapes and sizes:

Big (519 boys) Deerfield has the last of the strong headmasters, shaping a school in his own image: Frank L. Boyden, 83. He runs the school without speedup courses or language labs, does not publish a catalogue or even a rule book. The "Little Fellow" (5 ft. 6 in.) calls himself "a country sort of person who likes boys," is famous for second chances: "If a boy needs to be expelled, he needs even more to stay here." Even bigger (630) Lawrenceville, in New Jersey, tackles size with a house system that keeps same-age students together for eating, sleeping, studying. Tuition hits $3,000 a year, but boys easily slide into Princeton, where Lawrenceville has more freshmen than any other school. Bigness is solved at Indiana's Culver Military Academy (840 boys), now a topkick prep school, by insisting that "discipline is essential to the learning process."

Staying small is the idea at Groton, which is far less snobbish than people think. Episcopal Groton, which schooled F.D.R., has 34 teachers for 229 boys (including three Negroes). Seniors supervise younger boys. All sleep in dormitory cubicles, wash in plastic (once tin) basins, the legacy of Founder Endicott Peabody's muscular Christianity. "The important thing is not training a boy's brain," says Groton's headmaster, the Rev. John Crocker. "It's having a decent guy when you're done."

The so-called "St. Grottlesex"* schools are supposedly ultra-swank as well as churchy (Episcopal). Yet Kent treats its 292 boys like poverty-vowing lay brothers. They make beds, wait tables, scrub floors, do K.P., and the consequent saving is passed on in the form of sliding-scale tuition. Despite its monasticism, Kent recently opened a "coordinate" school for 200 girls, who even attend some classes with boys.

That idea is old at the two Milton Academies (291 boys, 181 girls), whose blueblood alumni include Cabots, Saltonstalls and a Kennedy (Bobby). The fact that John F. Kennedy went to Choate, where the class of '35 voted him "most likely to succeed," helped deluge that already top school last year with a record 2,400 inquiries for 155 places. Other Choate alumni: Adlai Stevenson, Weatherly Skipper Bus Mosbacher, Lyricist Alan Jay Lerner, Novelist John Dos Passos, Playwright Edward Albee (see THEATER).

Top-ranked Roman Catholic prep school is Portsmouth Priory (220 boys), which aims not at Holy Cross or Notre Dame, but at Harvard, Yale, Princeton. New England-style prep schools are rare outside the East, but the best include Ohio's Western Reserve (235 boys), Colorado's Fountain Valley, California's Cote, which puts on classical drama in the original languages. California's Thacher shuns football but requires every boy to own and operate his own horse for two years. Top event there is a gymkhana featuring orange-spearing at full gallop. Equally important now: a summer program in math and astronautics. One smart crew of Thacher satellite trackers recently exposed an error in Russian data.

From Arabic to archaeology, nearly every school now boasts something special. At Hotchkiss, which still sends 25% of its graduates to Yale, the stress is on sound English and modern math. Each year some boys finish in the eleventh grade, may go on for a year at an English school. Pennsylvania's Hill livens up humanities with a two-year course that correlates the art, music and literature of any one period. Science and philosophy go into a similar course for all seniors at Loomis, which is also strong on atmospheric science. Pomfret is particularly proud of intensive area studies, has sent students to Africa and India in the summer, on the ground, as one Pomfret teacher puts it, that "we can't just sit here on our hilltop." Upper-crusty, hockey-playing St. Paul's makes admirable use of the summer with a pioneering school for gifted New Hampshire public school students.

Exeter, though often mentioned in tandem with Andover, is significantly different. Exeter has put up only one new building in 30 years, but is richer (endowment: $35.2 million, book value). It began actively recruiting poor boys long before Andover. Though it gives fewer scholarships to fewer students, it gives bigger ones, reaches deeper into low-income groups.

Next year Exeter's tuition will rise to $2,100, topping Andover's, partly because it spends more for instruction--it has fewer students per teacher. It also boasts more Westinghouse winners (twelve) than Andover, and this month it topped all U.S. schools in National Merit Scholarship finalists: 73 to Andover's 18.

Exeter's towering (6 ft. 4 in.) Principal William G. Saltonstall, 56, is not only a first-rate history teacher but also a noted athlete who won three varsity letters at Harvard. He still coaches Exeter teams most afternoons, looks from 50 yards like a 1962 All-America with prematurely white hair. Because he believes in "motherhood and the home," Saltonstall is reducing the number of younger boys at Exeter, took in only 90 juniors this year, against Andover's 140. The purpose: more maturity at Exeter and "more new blood." Though it is smaller than Andover, Exeter thus has the same number of seniors, last June sent its graduates to more (54) colleges, while also getting more (57) boys into Harvard.

Full of other ideas, Saltonstall believes that boys of different ages should live in the same dormitories; Andover does the opposite. Deeply concerned about public schools, Saltonstall helps out in every way he can. Exeter holds summer conferences for public school teachers, invites some to work in its classrooms for a year. To help improve New Hampshire public schools, Saltonstall serves on a study commission appointed by the Governor. It may jolt colleagues, but Saltonstall believes that, ultimately and ideally, "private schools should become obsolete."

Not all parents want or can afford to turn their teen-agers over to schools 24 hours a day, and their needs account for a boom in day schools. The country day kind can match a boarding school's big playing fields, gets just as many graduates into top colleges. Notable around Philadelphia are Haverford (802 boys), a good Main Line escalator to Princeton, and Episcopal Academy (742 boys), biggest Episcopal day school in the U.S. Philadelphia's Quakers support strong coed day schools, such as topnotch Germantown Friends (enrollment: 725). The top Quaker boys' school is also a day school: Philadelphia's William Penn Charter (702 boys), one of the oldest (1689) and best schools in the U.S. Oldest private school of all (1638) is Manhattan's Collegiate (395 boys), now famous for experiments in programmed learning. Oldest endowed school (1645): Boston's Roxbury Latin (205 boys), which rejected James B. Conant as headmaster just before Harvard accepted him as president. St. Mark's School of Texas (570 boys), which has cut off Andover's business in Dallas, was started by rich Texans for just that reason. To give their sons an Andover-level education without sending them away, they recently gave St. Mark's a remarkable science building that outdoes Andover's.

* St. Paul's, Saint Mark's, St. George's, Groton, Kent, Middlesex.

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