One at a Time

Lloyd Clark had been headmaster of Kiskiminetas Springs School in Saltsburg, Pa. for only a few months when he got the jolt. It came in a casual conversation with Cornell's President Edmund Day at the Kiski-Cornell freshmen football game.

"Kiski has been good to us," said Day. "It gave us our football coach, Carl Snavely. But wouldn't it be wonderful if your boys were as interested in studying as they are in football?" The remark so upset Headmaster Clark that he could scarcely watch the rest of the game (his team lost, 14-0).

Kiski had indeed been good to many a U.S. college: it had produced more all-America football players (67)* than any other prep school. But to Headmaster Clark, that sort of reputation was suddenly disturbing. "Why," he kept asking himself, "can't we make our boys as interested in studying as they are in football?"

"More in Summer." Headmaster Clark, a Phillips Exeter and Amherst ('17) man, was neither a football man nor a professional educator. He was a businessman who had once run an audience-survey company with Claude (Hooperating) Hooper. But he remembered what Harvard's Bliss Perry had once said during a summer course. "Everyone learns more in summer," said Perry, "because he concentrates on a single subject." Headmaster Clark decided that education might be like that all year 'round.

In 1942 he began trying out his ideas in his own summer school. Failures dropped by half. In 1944 he put the whole school on the "Kiski Plan."

Kiski's 200 students no longer go from French to history to geometry and back again each day. For nine weeks, one group of students takes nothing but English. Then, after a four-day holiday, the group may begin nine weeks of mathematics, then a language, then history or science. Students and teachers both seem to like the new schedule. Dismissals for scholastic failure have dropped from 15 a year to zero and there is no sign at all that students are bored by their nine-week stretches. "You'd be surprised," says Clark. "For most of them it is the first time they have a chance to get really interested in a subject."

French in Paris. Today, athletics are still important at Kiski (one recent graduate: Olympic Decathlon Champion Bob Mathias), but not all-important. Kiski wants to see its students on the playing field in the afternoon but it insists they spend their evenings in "cultural studies," e.g., practicing the piano, rehearsing with the orchestra, reading.

This year Headmaster Clark decided to take his plan one step farther. Last week he had 14 of his boys in Paris, starting off each morning with a breakfast of croissants and cafe au lait, studying four hours in a Sorbonne classroom, then fanning out over the city to see the sights. Everything was according to the Kiski plan: concentrating on a single subject, the boys had begun to handle French with assurance.

Next fall, during their regular nine-week language period, Headmaster Clark plans to send other students to Mexico to study Spanish. Next spring, it will be Luxembourg for German. When U.S. colleges get the present crop of Kiski boys, Clark hopes, they will find them as interested in studies as in football. And they may find that some of them are good football men, too.

* Including some second-and third-team choices. Among the best known: Notre Dame's Harry Stuhldreher, Columbia's Cliff Montgomery, Stanford's Monk Moscrip.

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