Horse Sense & Soul-Saving

The best teachers trained in the South are turned out by a college with only.a wisp of national fame. Its alumni include the presidents of 16 colleges and universities, hundreds of superintendents and principals. This week, on its 60-acre colonnaded campus in Nashville, George Peabody College for Teachers quietly marked its 162nd birthday, and prepared to carry on with the earnest air of an evangelist who knows that there is always another soul to be saved.

Founded as Davidson Academy, the school had Andrew Jackson as one of its earliest trustees; Peabody Library still preserves a biography on whose flyleaf Old Hickory scrawled a withering estimate of his biographer. But it was a damyankee merchant named George Peabody and his $2,000,000 that put Peabody on its feet. Despite this taint, most of Peabody's 1,850 students still come from the South, and President Henry Harrington Hill expects his 125-man faculty and 60,000 alumni to concentrate on Southern schools.

Peabody's division of field studies has surveyed 20 state and city educational systems, in the South and Southwest, and recommended . improvements. It is the South's No. 1 propagandist for more junior colleges--stressing technical training. Reasons Hill: "In junior colleges, we can train men to be factory superintendents and they don't need to learn Latin to do it."

Hill himself quit a $15,000 job as superintendent of Pittsburgh's schools to go back South "because I can do more here than anywhere else." Hill landed in education quite by accident; while recuperating from an auto crash in Arkansas, he took a job teaching--for $65 a month.

A friend once observed that he could walk a mile in the time it takes Henry Hill to walk through a hotel lobby. A lanky, easy-spoken fellow of 53, Hill walked and talked his way through a lot of lobbies last year as president of the American Association of School Administrators. His hard-headed administrative outlook: "Let's have glorious ideals for education, but let's use horse sense in achieving them." Typical of his horse sense was the time when, as a school superintendent, he was called by the mayor, who wanted to boost somebody for a job. Hill wasn't annoyed. Says he: "I wouldn't want to employ anybody who had no friends at all, even if he were reduced to only the mayor."

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