Education: At Kent School

“You fellows can make beds?” “Yes.” “You can sweep floors?” “Absolutely.”

“Well, I can cook eggs ” said the headmaster of a newborn preparatory school. He was addressing his students The Negro servants had just walked out because of the poverty of the school. That was in 1906 when the Rev. Frederick Herbert Sill took 18 boys and two faculty members to a farmhouse in the Berkshire Hills of Connecticut and founded Kent School. The beds-floors-eggs incident was the beginning of a student-supervised, student-broom-wielding system which runs the school to this day. Students regulate discipline, keep order in study hall, wait on tables, manage the athletic teams, keep the equipment —from footballs to library books— in order. Wealthy boys and boys of moderate means are treated alike. The system is based solely on. individual merits, with upperclassmen at the helm.

Today Kent School consists of a dozen neat colonial buildings, 250 students, a waiting list which many a 50-year-old school may well envy, and a branch school of 70 boys at South Kent, Conn. Graduates of Kent have distinguished themselves at Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Williams, Amherst. For several years, they won the annual scholarship cup at Harvard. In the present Yale senior class, the outstanding athlete and the chairman of the University newspaper are Kent graduates.

Kent has maintained the healthy characteristics of a small school chiefly because of Father Frederick H. Sill, who is headmaster, religious guide, crew coach, pater familias. He is an Episcopalian and so are most of his boys, but he does not proselyte. If the school has a sanctum, it is Father Sill’s study with low, slanting roof, often-disturbed shelves of books, a littered desk and several leather chairs. The conversations of this room are the unwritten and authentic chronicle of Kent. Many-times-famed have been the crews of Kent.

Many times Father Sill has said: “I’d like to take my crew to England.” A few parents hinted that the publicity of such a trip would be harmful to schoolboy athletes—contrary to Kent’s traditions of simplicity. But Father Sill quickly shaped his wish into a plan, and last week sailed with his crew squad for England, student third class on the Berengaria. The Kent crew will enter the Henley Regatta, will also row separate races with Eton and Radley, will visit Oxford and Cambridge.