School on Wheels

It was 2:30 a.m., and the 16 boys were tired and rumpled as they left Philadelphia's Convention Hall. They had just heard Harry Truman's fighting speech to the Democrats. As the boys climbed aboard their shiny yellow bus for the jolting, three-hour trip to New York, a 15-year-old spoke up: "He's really quite dynamic. I hadn't realized it before."

The 16 boys were the entire student body of Landhaven School in Camden, Me. Boys at Landhaven get their education on the scene, and on the run. Next afternoon their bus was parked at Lake Success, while they watched the U.N. Security Council in session.

Broadway to the Bowery. This week Landhaven's students wound up a month-long stay in New York. They had camped out in the gymnasium of a settlement house on Manhattan's lower East Side, and earned their keep by replastering the walls, painting, repairing chairs, and building a handicraft shop in the settlement house. They had toured the museums, the Bowery and Chinatown. They had also seen, among other plays, The Respectful Prostitute and A Streetcar Named Desire.

"Perhaps," admitted Headmaster Michael Millen, "these plays are unsuitable for children. But our boys are exceptionally bright, and anything that shows them what living is really like is good."

The Rev. Michael Millen is a slight, earnest 26-year-old. A Methodist preacher, he wears a clerical collar, partly because he considers himself a "high" Methodist, partly as a badge of authority which his boys respect. He inherited Landhaven's 60 acres in Maine from his father, a wealthy farmer and businessman in Coin, Iowa. Young Millen had planned a school built to his own specifications ever since his own unsatisfying prep-school days. After Harvard ('42), he got three other well-to-do Harvard-men so fired with his ideas that they agreed to take jobs as masters--at no salary. He opened Landhaven two years ago with twelve boys.

The Open Road. "Reverend Mike" has set the maximum enrollment at 30--"a busload." Whenever masters and boys feel the itch, the school piles into its bus, with one of the masters at the wheel, and goes singing on its way. Studying the plays of Shaw and the poems of T. S. Eliot, they have driven down to Boston to see Man and Superman and hear Eliot lecture at Harvard. To study farming, and to earn a little spending money for other trips, they will bus to Aroostook County this fall to help with the potato harvest.

Money is neither an object nor an obstacle at Landhaven. Those who can afford it pay the full $1,650 a year. For others, Millen has not only written off the tuition altogether, but provided clothes, books and pocket money. But every Landhavener must pass a Stanford-Binet test with a "gifted" rating: the average I.Q. for the group entering this fall is 150.

Landhaven has no "forms" or class "years." Students graduate when progress tests convince the masters that they are ready for college. The boys get only six weeks' vacation each summer; the rest of the school year is broken into three terms, on the English model. Students and masters share the school's housekeeping chores.

Lessons Disguised. Landhaven teaches the standard college-preparatory courses, but disguises them with every mechanical aid to education it can lay its hands on--educational movies, phonograph records, "projects."

Classes are built around "core projects" lasting a full term. One, which called for making a movie, said Millen, involved mathematics in setting up cameras, placing actors and reading light meters; the chemistry of photography and the physics of light and sound; English composition in the preparation of scenarios. A production of Shakespeare's Julius Caesar brought up the study of Elizabethan drama, Latin, the history of Rome and--with only a little stretching--modern Italy "as a buffer state between the democratic and the totalitarian regimes."

Reverend Mike runs the school on three "rules": no comic books ("they oversimplify and distort life"), no chewing gum ("vulgar"), observance of Christian principles ("enough code for any man"). Disciplinary problems are few. When a twelve-year-old was chided for being gloomy and uncooperative, he piped: "I'm slightly manic-depressive, so it's no wonder I've got the blues."

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