School of Hard Knocks

"Andrew, do you realize that you're a gutless chameleon?" asked Teacher Jim Searles of the shy, withdrawn teen-ager who had come for an interview at the Hyde School in Bath, Me. Andrew was close to tears, but Searles was only following the sock-it-to-'em pedagogic philosophy of his boss, Hyde Founder Joseph Gauld, 50. Faced with a rebellious applicant, Gauld once shouted, "Listen, I'm telling you either change your attitude around me or I will jam it down your throat."

Although annual fees for tuition, board and room add up to a hefty $4,700, life at the small (enrollment: 175) coed boarding school is almost as rigorous as that of a Marine boot camp. Many of the students are troubled, and short-tempered Gauld treats them like a drill instructor faced with a platoon of left-footed recruits. He occasionally slaps and routinely humiliates the kids--with their parents' tacit consent--in a no-holds-barred effort to toughen them up and build their characters. "The rod is only wrong in the wrong hands," Gauld likes to say. When he finds that a student has what he considers a "bad attitude," Gauld may order him to wear a sign saying I ACT LIKE A BABY, or tell him to dig a 6-ft. by 6-ft. trench and then fill it up. He has even conducted a public paddling ceremony at Hyde.

As headmaster at Berwick Academy in South Berwick, Me., in the early '60s, Gauld (who has degrees from Bowdoin College and Boston University) grew discouraged with what he saw as the "coddling" of students, and an overemphasis on grades. With $100,000 borrowed from family and friends, Gauld bought an old mansion on the Maine coast and set up a school devoted to developing self-confidence and selfdiscipline. Novel and untested, Hyde could not hope to attract outstanding students; thus Gauld started by accepting teen-agers with a history of mental illness or drug problems. The student body now includes less disturbed youngsters. However, all of them, Gauld says, "have problems." He feels such pupils have a greater capacity for growth than conventional, "successful" children.

Character Grades. Success at Hyde is measured largely by "character growth" rather than academic excellence. Students are given two sets of grades: one for performance in a traditional curriculum laden with remedial courses; the other, which is considered more important, for overcoming personal problems such as being shy or cowardly, as shown in survival tests the school has copied from Outward Bound. The grades in character development are hammered out in a kind of encounter group, where classmates and teachers urge a student to confess his strengths and weaknesses. In similar sessions, teachers are evaluated publicly by the students.

So, in a way, are parents. As one alumnus puts it, "A family, not a kid, comes to Hyde." Parents are required to make a strong commitment to Hyde's philosophy. They participate in two encounter weekend seminars annually, at which everyone criticizes everyone else. One father, for example, may say to another: "Mr. Smith, I have to agree with Bill. You do seem more concerned with your own image than anything else."

Loyal Alumni. For students, the emotional turmoil can be difficult to take. Says Margie Malone, 17: "Everyone wants to run away from here sometime." In fact, each year about 50 students do run away--and 20 never return. Gauld blames the dropout rate on the parents' failure to uphold their pledge to make runaways return to Hyde. Margie ran away, but returned because "my mother stuck by her commitment. It brought us closer together."

Gauld believes all schools could benefit from his methods. For a while he gave up his headmaster post to travel around the country lecturing about Hyde, and he is now writing a book about it. As part of its proselytizing effort, the school also put on a traveling Bicentennial road show called America's Spirit. Starring Hyde teachers and pupils, the show played in Broadway's Circle in the Square theater because the theater's director, Ted Mann, is a Hyde parent.

Despite its small enrollment, Hyde turns out exceptionally good athletic teams, and 95% of its graduates, according to Gauld, have gone on to college. Many are loyal alumni. Says Will Collins, 22, a student at Grinnell College in Iowa: "Hyde is a conservative school advocating not a return to traditional values but to excellence." Some parents credit the school with changing their own lives for the better, as well as "remarkably" improving their children.

But Hyde also has plenty of critics.

Asks J.B. Satterthwaite, retired head of the English department at Groton School in Groton, Mass.: "If a teen-ager is publicly humiliated, does this build his character? Does it build the character of other students who are encouraged to take part in such a show?" The school's first teacher, Ray Fisher, who quit because Gauld permitted no disagreement with his own hawkish views on Viet Nam, charges that Gauld "is completely obsessed. You find that the kids are in effect brainwashed." Doris Vladimiroff, director of HEW'S Upward Bound program in Maine, whose son went to a Hyde summer session, complains: "Gauld's techniques are nothing less than demoniacal."

Despite the large number of problem children, there are no psychologists on the school's staff, because Hyde teachers prefer to "use our gut feelings." When that approach fails, Gauld has referred students to Richard Evans, a psychiatrist in Brunswick, Me. Like many parents of Hyde students, Evans is willing to give the school the benefit of the doubt. Says he: "Frankly, I'm puzzled. But ordinary methods don't work with the kinds of kids going to Hyde. The school does make a real effort to reach these children. It is doing something no one else is willing to do."

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