No Thirst

In 1927, watching his Kent School (Conn.) crew sprinting to victory past an English shell on the Thames, the Rev. Frederick H. Sill decided that British schoolboys ought to get a chance to visit the U.S. Last week chubby, blond Anthony Stewart Arnold was back in England, after a year at Kent on one of the Schoolboy Scholarships started by Father Sill 20 years ago. Like other young Britons who had made the trip last year, 18-year-old Tony Arnold thought that U.S. prep schools were great fun to visit--but no place to get an education.

Tony conceded that his year at Kent School had loosened him up. Said he: "The spirit at Kent is terrific. I learned to take my shirttail out of my trousers, so to speak, and let it dangle." He had even learned to call his teachers Jack, Chuck and Bill--something that would have been considered scandalous at Radley College, his English school.

But in any intellectual race, Tony Arnold thought, Radley would win in a walk. Said he: "At Radley, I used to tell my master that I planned to do an essay on some subject. It wasn't the deadline that mattered, it was the quality. At Kent, we were told to have an essay ready on an assigned subject by Monday morning. Everybody just dashed off something with the least possible effort. Students at Kent are just shoehorned along to graduating." The boys talked about sex "for hours & hours," but were innocent of political ideas.

Greek at Twelve. At swank St. Mark's School in Massachusetts, cherubic Edward John Trevor Davies found his U.S. schoolmates deficient in languages ("Everybody was surprised that I had studied Greek when I was twelve"), English grammar ("The average boy could not express himself on paper"), and European history ("Only 10% knew the number of the monarch of Great Britain").

Peter Grahame Fletcher, an old Dover College boy, had spent his U.S. year at New Jersey's Peddie School. He preferred the English scheme of sorting the bright boys and the bumbleheads into separate forms to the American method of lumping them into an "intellectually mediocre" alloy. Fletcher considered his history teachers at Peddie too insistent on their own nationalistic opinions. ("At Dover, my history master told us to find out for ourselves who was right and who was wrong.") Charles Frederick Kinnard Dunn, who had gone from Eastbourne College to Pennsylvania's rich Hill School, was also surprised at the "fanatic patriotism of Americans, the constant harping on the American heritage."

Decadence. Keith John Reeve, an alumnus of Bromsgrove (A. E. Housman's school), thought that his monastic old school would do better to imitate the social life at St. James in Maryland, where there were three dances a year and dates almost every week. Otherwise he was sticking by Bromsgrove. Said Reeve: "At Bromsgrove, we developed a thirst for knowledge. At St. James, boys were apt to regard culture as a sign of decadence, devotion to learning as the mark of a sissy. The student merely wants to learn enough to pass the next test. Then it goes out of his mind as easily as it came in."

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