nature, and inclusive admissions policies. This era also saw the rise of several prominent Catholic boarding schools like Portsmouth Abbey (RI) and Canterbury (CT).
Boarding schools of this era were the source of several pedagogical innovations, notably the Harkness or Conference Method of teaching. Begun at Exeter by its famed principal Lewis Perry with funds provided by industrialist/philanthropist Edward Harkness, the Harkness Method used a large oval wooden table for classes that emphasized discussion and connection between the students rather than lecture from the teacher. Like the campus circle, the oval Harkness table emphasized community involvement and communication. This innovation soon spread to peer schools and then throughout the prep world, where it continues on strongly today.
The Modern Era (1950s-2000)
The aftermath of World War II heralded a series of major societal and economic changes to America in general and the prep school world in particular. The economic boom of the 1950s and 60s rocketed the American middle class into prosperity. Increasing numbers of middle class students applied for college admissions; many went on to professional and business careers in numbers never seen before.
This aspirational stampede prompted universities to chart a new course for their enrollment. Instead of focusing on the children of established upper class families, college admission offices widened their focus to include the high achieving children of the middle class, whose abilities and hard work appeared to point to a new class of achievers.
Concurrent with this new opportunity for middle class students, formerly excluded groups were admitted to colleges in increasing numbers as the emerging civil rights movement in the 1950s and 60s put the issue of improved opportunities for African American students and other minority students at the forefront of social discussion.
Black students were tentatively admitted to boarding schools in the mid century. Gradually diversity became the watchword. Widespread coeducation followed soon after. Some boys and girls schools merged – Choate and Rosemary Hall, Northfield and Mount Hermon (MA), Loomis and Chaffee (CT). Most of the boys’ schools added girls. The newly coed schools experienced a relaxation of the old conflict based boys’ culture, more focus on the individual, and more attention to student comforts. Meanwhile, several girls’ schools chose to remain single sex and have thrived, including Madeira (VA), Westover (CT), Hockaday (TX) and Dana Hall (MA).
Religion at many boarding schools also changed. Many schools dropped their religious affiliations; others watered down their religious aspects. Daily chapel morphed from a focus on prayer and sermons to school meetings, or was terminated altogether. Ecumenicalism – an acceptance and promotion of a wide array of world religions – sprang forth, with campus-based or affiliated chaplains of many faiths. Religious instruction turned from tenets of doctrine to courses in cultural history. Nevertheless, many schools have maintained their traditional church affiliations.
International students have been a presence on American boarding school campuses since the earliest days. Today, internationals are enrolling in larger numbers, bringing a global perspective to the prep school tradition, but also raising the prospect of institutional transformation. This new question of how the schools can accommodate a global population without losing their distinct cultural identities continues as a major challenge. Going forward, American boarding schools must find ways to reconcile their traditions with the forward momentum of the modern world.
OLD MONEY, NEW MONEY, AND NO MONEY
The history of boarding schools also embodies another American theme, one that has been constant through time - the establishment of elites, the rise of social mobility, and the quest for acceptance by excluded groups. The relationship between three aspects of American society – Old Money, New Money and for want of a better term, No Money, continues to play out on boarding school campuses.
Old Money derives from the earliest American elites, wealthy colonial families who devised behaviors and legal structures to ensure the preservation of capital and the means to pass it on within families from generation to generation. These families provided the wherewithal to found cultural and educational institutions, including the academies, as well as political leadership. Old Money families inherit and manage their wealth; work is not a means to acquire more money, it is an opportunity for service or personal enrichment. Since the earliest wealth in the United States derived from the British colonies and then the states created from them, the original Old Money people were and continue to be primarily WASPs.
WASP, an acronym for “White Anglo-Saxon Protestant” was first coined by the influential sociologist E. Digby Baltzell (1915-1996), himself a WASP with an elite education (St. Paul’s, Penn and Columbia). Baltzell’s contention that an ongoing American aristocracy was necessary to provide national leadership was tempered by his view that rising individuals from other backgrounds should join the elite based on their merits. Baltzell, who wrote from the 1950s to the 1990s, maintains influence today.
The earliest Old Money included the “Mayflower families” – the colonial New England merchants and the Dutch families who controlled New York back when it was the Dutch colony of New Amsterdam. Recently wealthy businessmen with no social background, such as John Jacob Astor, were never fully accepted, shunned as “New Money” arrivistes; in time their descendents became Old Money as well.
The rush of wealth created after the Civil War brought an entirely new wave of successful New Money families, flush with cash but lacking social credentials. These newcomers, were despised as crass, status obsessed materialists by the Old Money crowd (some of whom, of course, were rather recently considered New Money). Newly prosperous New Money families, intent on social success, were largely responsible for the sudden explosion of prep school foundings in the 1880s and 90s, the Gilded Age. These Gilded Age New Money families wanted their children to mingle with and marry into Old Money, and much of the social anxieties of the era have to do with these tensions; the novels of Henry James and Edna Ferber all do. These tensions exist in the modern era; Nelson Aldrich, Jr.’s Old Money (1988) limns this world in elegant detail.
According to Baltzell and Aldrich, New Money people are economically ascendant, focused on success, power, prestige, and status possessions. Trophy marriages are New Money habits. New Money relies less on extended families and more on nuclear families, yet with a focus on acquisitiveness and febrile upward striving – more money, more power, more fame, and more social acceptance. Old Money people live quietly. New Money people live large, with lavish lifestyles, leveraged assets, and public personalities. While Old Money remains mostly WASPs, New Money now includes families from every background in the world. The 20th century story of the Kennedy family and the current ones of the Trumps and the Clintons are New Money sagas of financial and political success followed by quests for social acceptance, with mixed results. New Money families seek status and prestige. Old Money families, such as the Bushes and the Roosevelts, seek to maintain relevance in a changing world.
Families without capital or social influence (let’s call them No Money) didn’t figure into this mix. With the exception of some scholarship students at the old academies, No Money students were not admitted to the boarding schools, nor had the means to pay the tuition even if they were accepted. This changed in the modern era with the advent of diversity and inclusion on boarding campuses. Schools which had built large endowments earmarked funds for grants for students needing tuition support. As a result, present day boarding schools include student populations from Old Money, New Money, and No Money backgrounds.
This history has significance in several ways. First, boarding school is a rare circumstance in modern society where young people of radically different backgrounds mingle, work, eat, study, and socialize together on a day to day basis. One result of this is a tendency for boarding school graduates to have more understanding of “other people” than peers from their own social background may do.
