Education: A Matter of Personality

Claude M. Fuess decided to interrupt his graduate studies at Columbia University to take a job in the English Department at Phillips Academy in Andover, Mass. He meant to stay for only a year, but he stayed for 40, first as a teacher and later as headmaster. Last week, in the course of a mellow autobiography called Independent Schoolmaster (Atlantic-Little, Brown; $5), Claude Fuess told what makes a great teacher, by recalling some of the “Olympians” he has known.

Bony Body. In 40 years, Fuess (pronounced Fuss, Few-ess, Feis and Foos—but he prefers Fease) came to know some of the nation’s top schoolmen, and he soon realized that the “caricature of the pedagogue with . . . his emaciated and bony body, his oversized horn spectacles, and his hairless, shining dome, in no way corresponds to reality.”

For instance, Alfred E. Stearns, Fuess’s predecessor at Andover, was anything but a “dryasdust pedant… At times he displayed a fiery temper, and on at least two occasions peremptorily ‘fired’ an instructor in anger, only to repent and apologize before sunset. Sometimes he made enemies by the stout fashion in which he spoke out, but the boys liked his … strong convictions … He continually stressed . . . moral issues; and like Thomas Arnold he was more interested in forming character than in producing scholars.”

Endicott Peabody of Groton was quite another sort—”A magnificent specimen of the Grand Old Man, still erect and towering in his eighties, and looking like the embodiment of rectitude and moral force . . . Horace Taft,*who had also created an important school, was outstanding, too … He was, however, far more of a humorist, and a twinkle always lurked in his tolerant eyes.” Once, after listening to two members of the Headmasters’ Association wrangling over some minor matter of undergraduate discipline, “Uncle Horace” abruptly rose and strode out of the room. “How’s that debate coming out?” Fuess asked him outside. “There won’t much come of it,” replied Taft. “One of them never was a boy, and the other never grew up!”

Individual Style. All in all, says Fuess, his 40 years were a golden age of headmasters. There was witty, debonair Lewis Perry of Exeter, hulking N. Horton Batchelder, “a grand old stalwart, who built Loomis School into a distinguished institution,” and Frank L. Boyden, who, “with his love for horses and antiques, his Yankee shrewdness, his aversion for public speaking, his passion for telephoning and automobiling, his unaffected simplicity combined with benevolent despotism,” built Deerfield Academy (enrollment: 470) out of a tiny local school with only 14 students.

Looking back over all these men, Fuess decides that they had one thing in common. Their greatness was all a matter of personality, for not one of them seemed to give a hang about pedagogical theories. The lesson that they taught was that teaching “is an art, not a science; and every superior teacher, like every superior artist, though he may begin by imitation, eventually develops his own individual style . . . Like the actor, the teacher must . . . throw himself into his part—but he has to walk his stage alone! Rules and systems will avail him little. Only his personality can make him successful.

“All this,” concludes Schoolmaster Fuess, “I learned gradually, but I was still learning when I taught my last class.”

*Brother of President William Howard, uncle of Senator Bob.