Andover at War
I
WAR is the supreme test of the adaptability of institutions, whether governmental, industrial, religious, or educational. Those which are unbending, spongy with dry rot, or deficient in vitality crash before the continued storm; those which are deep-rooted and flexible adjust themselves to new conditions and survive. The American private secondary schools, which, as Dr. Gummere points out, have made such significant contributions to the nation in times of peace, are now facing the challenge of a rapidly changing world, and are feeling acutely their responsibility to their pupils and to their country.
In charting our future at Andover, we have started with some basic assumptions, the chief of which is that secondary education in a democracy should never cease to be preparation for life in a peaceful, freedom-loving world. If this were not so, we should all become without delay military schools, aiming to turn out boys trained solely in the most upto-date methods of slaying an enemy. The military school, as such, undeniably has its place, and a very respectable one, in a peacetime society, but the typical American secondary school will be concerned with less warlike skills.
The second fundamental assumption is that, in this present crisis, we must be prepared to organize almost overnight the new forms of specialized training required for armed combat between nations. Boys graduate from our schools, on the average, at the age of eighteen years and three months. Under existing conditions they are still exempt from call by their local draft boards; but they are eligible for various types of active service, including the Air Corps. On March 16, our government announced a program of ‘pre-flight training’ open to ‘pre-college American youth,’ and beginning in September will ‘ process ‘ 45,000 young flying students each year. According to a recent newspaper report, Canada has already instituted a volunteer corps of air cadets open to boys between the ages of twelve and seventeen, and under the command of Royal Canadian Air Force officers. We have no reason to expect that, if the war continues, our own boys of nineteen will not be enlisting in large numbers. The graduates of the private schools are healthy, courageous, and loyal, and as they see their friends putting on uniforms, they will not wish to remain behind.
We headmasters should not deceive ourselves on this point. No matter how much we may believe that our boys should wait until they are called, they simply won’t do it. As the war grows more exacting, the enrollment in colleges, even under the accelerated plan, will be smaller and smaller. This means that the secondary schools will feel obliged to make extra efforts to send out their graduates mature, self-reliant, and adequately trained.
A third assumption is that every boy should secure his secondary-school diploma, and, in the case of schools like Andover, his admission to college. The suggestion that the high-school period be accelerated or reduced to three years goes contrary to the whole process of nature, which cannot be hurried without danger to the adolescent. Furthermore, if, as we are praying, our foes collapse within the next year or two, the young soldier may then still go from the army camp to college, as many did in 1865 and 1918. The boy who enlists without earning his school diploma is unnecessarily impairing his whole civilian future.
II
The policy agreed upon by most private schools for the emergency begins with physical fitness, which underlies all military efficiency. Schools like Exeter, Lawrenceville, and Taft have long had programs of athletic sports in which each boy has been obliged to participate. This we all expect to continue. Now, however, we are superimposing at Andover a combination of posture work and body conditioning, involving exercise of the ‘toughening’ variety, from which no boy is excused unless ill or crippled. The value of drilling and marching to music has always seemed to me great, and perhaps next year we may use it with the two upper classes. Judging from what I see at my own and other schools, the mere business of standing erect, chin up, shoulders back, facing the world, needs more emphasis than it has had in recent years. Slouchiness, untidiness, and sloppiness in general are infinitely more detrimental to school discipline in wartime than they are in peace.
As for any formal uniformed military regimen for schools like Andover, the best judgment is unfavorable. We tried such a system during World War I, and for a season I was successively a private, a ‘non-com,’ and a second lieutenant in the unit. Our corps was never officially under government maintenance or control, although we secured retired or wounded veterans to direct it. It seemed to me to be, like most halfway measures, unsatisfactory — confused, aimless, and superficial. If or when the War Department takes over our schools in order to establish units of a Reserve Officers’ Training Corps, we shall coöperate wholeheartedly. At present, however, we are advised that we cannot as private enterprises secure either officers or matériel. That disposes of the question temporarily so far as Andover is concerned.
On the intellectual side, we are retaining our long-standing framework of English, history, foreign languages, mathematics, science, and the fine arts, but with greatly shifted emphasis in many cases. Frequent and insistent questioning of higher authorities only confirms our judgment that the importance of mathematics can hardly be exaggerated as preparation for active service in a mechanized army. Accordingly we propose to teach a larger number of our boys to know elementary mathematics really well, and we are also instituting special courses in the higher branches for those qualified to profit by them. For many undergraduates, we shall reduce the amount of time spent on the so-called ‘cultural’ subjects. Physics and chemistry are being revised by our instructors to meet war needs, and we are now offering simple but adequate courses in communications and in radio. The internal combustion engine, hitherto rated under ‘hobbies,’ is now being taken more seriously, as are photography and map reading and interpretation. We are considering the possibility of work in ground aviation, for which we have ample space. All we require now is a suitable response from the government. Several boys during this school year have been allowed, with their parents’ approval, to take flying lessons at a near-by airport, under competent instruction, and their practice will undoubtedly be emulated next year by others who can meet the rigid requirements. In the modern foreign languages, we are altering our technique to place more emphasis on speaking and reading and less on formal grammar. Next year we shall have groups in French, German, and Spanish actually speaking the language together day after day at tables in the dining hall.
While we should not ordinarily in peacetime have considered any such drastic modifications, I am not much concerned about the sanctity of the curriculum. Our immediate, indeed almost our only, purpose in our schools today should be to make our contribution to an all-out effort as a people. Unless we win our victory, the cultural elements in our education may vanish altogether for many decades to come. Even if for a few years direct preparation for war should absolutely control the curriculum, we should still recover — always provided we are victorious.
Aside from the formal curriculum requirements, we are introducing almost from week to week optional instruction in other war activities. More than a hundred boys have already taken and passed a stiff course in first aid. A larger number are shooting every evening on the rifle range. Selected groups are studying camouflage in the Art Gallery, taking gasoline engines apart, practising on the typewriter (a valuable skill to any soldier), and even experimenting with electronics; indeed, I find that impromptu classes are starting up all over the Hill in such fields as military history or geography, the master trying to keep a little ahead of his self-appointed pupils. This is all to the good. If it persists, we may find our boys actually eager for education.
Our teachers will be fewer next year, and therefore we shall have larger classroom sections. An instructor in English who now has five divisions, with an average of twelve in each, may in 1942-1943 have six divisions of eighteen or twenty; but nobody is objecting. The masters who remain wish to keep the places warm for their colleagues who are, or soon will be, at the front. Everybody will work a little harder for the same salary.
Added responsibility will have to be thrown on the boys themselves. With fewer faculty proctors available, students will have to choose their own dormitory committees for enforcing the rules and regulations. Already each dormitory has its own Deputy Air Raid Warden and Deputy Housemaster, with very specific duties, and even larger delegation of authority to them is contemplated next year. The time is peculiarly propitious for placing responsibility for his own conduct squarely on the boy—a policy which has always been favored at genuinely American private schools, and which is certainly a phase of education for war. Andover, like Loomis, Deerfield, and many other schools, has always used student waiters in its dining halls. Some have gone further by having students make their own beds and take care of their own rooms, and this practice will doubtless become more widespread. The possibility of certain kinds of work ‘on the grounds’ has been suggested, but at Andover we are inclined to believe that other matters are more urgent. The trend is toward encouraging boys to stand on their own feet, to rely less on the services of others, and to develop that pioneer self-reliance which we once had as a people and have only lately lost.
We shall be operating on a smaller budget than usual. Income from investments is falling off and commodity costs are rising. 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.
If boys are to be kept in school until they are eighteen, they must not only feel that they are profiting by the experience, but also must contribute to the common cause. ‘Drives’ for the various service organizations, the regular purchase of defense bonds and stamps, the promotion of special enterprises, little self-sacrifices now and then, such as ‘meatless meals’ — all these help to keep morale healthy. Above all, boys like to be told the truth, to be talked to like men, to be reminded of the great moral and spiritual issues at stake in these momentous days.
III
Because it seems wasteful to let our extensive plant lie idle during the summer months, Andover is for the first time opening a summer session, from July 6 to August 29, using all its facilities, including a large proportion of its faculty. This is no educational innovation. Exeter has operated a summer school successfully for many years. Our own summer session, however, is primarily a war measure and will feature very strongly several aspects of military preparation. It is open not only to Andover boys, but also to students from other similar schools, and from the surrounding community. We shall include in the curriculum any specialized work within our scope required by current Army needs.
In certain sections of New England, plans are being made for students to assist local farmers in their seasonal requirements. The Hotchkiss School has already taken the leadership in coöperating with the farmers of northwestern Connecticut in planting and harvesting. Andover is in a different kind of community, and I suspect that our agricultural efforts, necessarily intermittent and amateurish, might be more confusing than efficient; but schools located in rural districts can do much to help the farm labor shortage, even to the extent of organizing farm camps to provide student help during the vacation period.
I must say a word about the relation of the private school to its village or town environment. Our Andover Adult Education program is, as far as I am aware, unique in that it offers to the townspeople an amazing variety of instruction, principally by the school’s own staff, on subjects ranging from folk dancing to rather abstruse finance. When war came, the existing program was at once expanded, with the result that literally hundreds of adults have been getting elementary training in first aid, air-raid protection, navigation, communications, spoken Spanish and German, military history, and many other fields. Dozens of prospective draftees have enrolled to ‘brush up’ on their trigonometry and physics. Our teachers, I should add, have contributed their services, the Trustees of Phillips Academy have given the classroom facilities, and the actual cost to the student has been infinitesimal. As an example of what can be done to bring Americans of all ages together, it deserves the highest praise.
Most of us are rapidly learning in these critical times a scorn of ‘miserable aims that end with self,’ but the exigency is also a practical one. The question with the independent schools, especially those which have hitherto been charged with ultraconservatism, is not so much whether they shall modify their policies as whether they can exist at all if they do not. Only in a free land can such schools survive, and the issue is now one of a survival of all free institutions. Hence the combined resources of the great private schools, their accumulated experience and wisdom, their planning and their practice, must be devoted during the next few months to the winning of the war, even if temporarily they have to abandon some of their cherished traditions. It is better to forsake part of our accumulated gains than to perish.