Obviously I’m not Nemo but…

would you have sent them somewhere that had done away with its library in favor of the internet?

I wouldn’t want mine going to any “school” that would replace a Library with the Net. Not a big selection of books for free and those that the “school” would have to pay for are also limited in both quantity and quality.

Thomas Parkman Cushing, who originally endowed the school, was careful to stipulate that it be provided, in addition to other accoutrements befitting an educational establishment, with a “suitable library.”

If I was one of Cushings heirs I’d be talking to a lawyer about the possibility for recovering the endowment and it’s earnings.

James Tracy, the current headmaster, finds the whole idea of a library, and the objects they traditionally contain, positively quaint. Speaking to The Boston Globe, he actually said, apparently without embarrassment, “When I look at books, I see an outdated technology, like scrolls before books.”

When I look at “schools” I see an outdated technology, like quill pens before felt tips. If I’m not mistaken, prep school type courses are currently available online from accredited schools. Within five years I expect to find at least one Master’s degree program available that doesn’t require setting foot on a campus.

I had an experience with a school like Cushing in New York City, and with a headmaster much like the sap quoted. My daughters went there from when each was three years old until the oldest was 13 and the youngest was 9.

My wife and I were unaware of just how bad a good lower school had become in just a few years. The place had been highly-respected, but rumors had been going around for a couple years that it had fallen off quite a bit.

This was confirmed when I heard one of my oldest daughter’s friends (who attended another school) remark one day, “Oh, [school name] — that’s a joke school.”

To be fair, a new headmaster had come in, and thrown out much of the rigor. (”If it were up to me, we would have no grades. If Johnny gets an A, then Suzie gets a C, and this does nothing for her confidence and self-esteem.” said he.)

As a result, many of the teachers and brightest kids had left. We found out about this when several things happened:

I received a copy of the glossy school magazine with a sentence in the lead story’s opening paragraph that read:

“Although some construction still remains, the new gymnasium has for all intensive purposes been completed.” When I sent an email pointing this out to the Headmaster, he tut-tutted “Well, maybe we should hire you as a proofreader.”

I went to my 8th grader’s teacher conferences, and asked her English teacher why their reading list was only 500 pages long for the entire year.

“Well,” she said. “We go into every word!”

Shortly thereafter, my kid came home and said “Well, today in English we played ‘find the noun.’”

Then the “Latin” teacher spent four classes showing “Gladiator.” He said it would give the kids a sense of the history, When I pointed out that the history in “Gladiator” was mostly fictional, he said something like “whatever.”

I could go on. The place was a disaster. My oldest simply declared her intention of entering my alma mater, The Hill School, the next fall. Well, she went to Andover instead (sigh), but now thrives at Wesleyan. The youngest we moved to Horace Mann, probably the most demanding private school in the NYC area, where she blossomed like an English meadow after a wet April, and she will interview at Andover et. al. this fall.

There are many Cushings. They are, as Bill has indicated, sucker traps for the intellectually pretentious.

I estimate that since my kids were born, I have spent $750,000 on tuition alone. Most of it was well worth it. But a large bill certainly doesn’t correlate with a good school.

And I will end with another story about Andover. My wife and I went up there after our daughter had been accepted, to attend an all-day program for the new admissions and their parents. The best part of the program was a one-hour presentation where each department head described what their department did, how they did it, and so on.

At the end, questions were invited. Immediately, one assertive snot stood up and said “Well, have you read Kornischstaler’s* “Poetry and Paedeia,” or Markus-Figweroa’s* very impressive articles on institutional autism, and have you incorporated ideas like these and other developments in modern pedagogical thinking into your curriculum?”

The department heads gave a collective sigh, and the microphone was passed down the row of teachers to a genial-looking gent with the classic rumpled tweed jacket and bushy white eyebrows — head of the History department, I believe — who said:

“We have over 100 teachers here and I doubt any two of them teach the same way. Naturally, we all are constantly talking to other teachers, and involved in our own continuing education, and I certainly hope that we are always improving how we do things. As for modern pedagogical thinking, I’m not sure what that is, but maybe this will help: we’ve been educating young people for over 200 years here, and I think we’ve gotten pretty good at it by now.”

The headmaster of The Hill School once defined a great school in one sentence:

“Every teacher at this school is constantly sending two messages simultaneously to every student: ‘we love you’ — and ‘eat your spinach.’”

That’s pretty much all it takes.

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*I wouldn’t bother Googling these. I made them up. But you get the idea.