Antidote for Easy Living

By normal standards of public relations, the brochure of the projected school was certainly strange. It advertised no buildings, laboratories or equipment, frankly admitted that the school had virtually none of these things to offer. Instead, it said, prospective students would have to count on building most of the plant themselves. Nonetheless, last week nine sturdy teen-aged students were already out in Colorado paying $350 for the privilege of creating--practically from scratch--the Colorado Rocky Mountain School.

To Founders John and Anne Holden, both 42, all this was not meant to be just an easy way of getting themselves a campus. Both former teachers at Vermont's Putney School, they had long since come to the conclusion that a little creative manual labor is just what modern education needs. This year, after months of planning, they pooled their slim savings, bundled their two children and furniture onto a truck, set out to transplant the Putney idea in the West. The place they picked was a log ranch house with a couple of chicken coops, located in Roaring Fork Valley, 30 miles northwest of Aspen.

Busy Students. When they first sent out their brochures, they quickly learned that they would be free from at least one problem: 35 teachers applied for free jobs, and nine camp counselors liked the idea so much that some of them offered to come out free for the summer, just to get things started. The Holdens accepted the counselors, hired four of the teachers, later added a nurse and a general secretary. By the end of June, they were all set for their first students to arrive to help put the campus in order.

Though the school does not actually open until fall (full year's fee: $1,550), the students and counselors have already done a good deal more than a term's work. They have planted a flourishing acre and a half garden and started storing up its vegetables in a neighbor's home freezer. They have rebuilt the two chicken houses, converting one into a girls' dormitory and the other into a red-curtained privy.

Just a Transition. They have built benches, desks, bunks and tables, have lined the ranch-house walls with book cases, installed cupboards, coat racks and window screens. They have cut and hauled several cords of wood, started clearing a ski trail, piled, loaded and sold 4,000 bales of hay to help fill up the school's near-empty coffers. Meanwhile, they have also done their housework--cooking, cleaning and making beds.

When fall comes, the students will go right on with such chores. Though they will study the usual prep-school courses and get their share of skiing, riding and playing, they will also plant, sew, dig irrigation ditches, scrub floors, haul wood, tend horses, clear paths, pound nails, rake leaves, paint walls, and do any other manual labor the Holdens can think of.

Is all this too much to ask of students? Not at all, says John Holden. "Work is nothing new. Coeducation is nothing new. Making your own entertainment is nothing new. This school will just be a transition between home and college that provides students with some of the inner resources of which many people have been robbed by easy modern living."

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