Quakers with the New Look

On the wooded campus of the George School, in Pennsylvania's rolling Bucks County, students call their principal "the Pope" and the cheerful cottage where he lives "the Vatican." Actually, the George School, founded in 1893, is the largest and one of the best Quaker prep schools in the U.S. It is also one of the nation's few coeducational boarding schools. Gentle, willowy George A. Walton has been the Pope longer than most of his students' parents can remember. Last week he announced that he was retiring. "Forty years," said he, "is long enough for one man to give all he's got to a school."

In those 40 years, Principal Walton has kept his school rigorously faithful to Quakerism. He himself lives so strictly and simply that even greying alumni are embarrassed to smoke in front of him. His 421 students--about half boys and half girls--do their own chores, wait on table, mow lawns, and clerk in the school store. For eight weeks each year, in place of English classes, they get special religious instruction: a study of ancient religions, selections from the Old Testament, the life and teaching of Jesus, the history and teachings of Quakerism.

Every morning, the students file into the bare assembly room, the boys seating themselves on one side and the girls on the other, for daily worship. The meeting begins with the usual few moments of silence. Then Principal Walton slowly unwinds his long legs and rises to read from the Bible. There is a period of silence again, and the pupils file out.

In spite of Walton's strict beliefs, the George School is as informal as a public high school. The boys dress in brightly colored sweaters, the girls have adopted the New Look. Students and teachers eat and work and worship together; and they all attend informal dances on Saturday night. Students of other faiths make up about half of George's enrollment.

The George School's new principal, Richard McFeely, is a Quaker who once coached football at George and is still known to alumni as "Mister Dick." A football player at Swarthmore, he was later struck down by infantile paralysis. At Warm Springs, Ga. he met the nurse he later married and became a good friend of Franklin Roosevelt. He is determined that George School under him shall be as it was under Walton.

Retiring Principal Walton, whose father was principal before him, says that he has been at George so long that he is beginning to get his generations mixed up. Says he: "When I blithely call a girl by her mother's name for a year and a half, it is time for someone else to take over."

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