Education: Folklore

From his busy little office in Boston, salty old Porter Sargent, whose sharp eyes and ears miss very little that is written or said about U. S. education, last week issued his annual report on the state of the nation’s biggest business.* Mr. Sargent, prefacing the 23rd edition of his famed handbook of private schools with a 160-page sound-off,† found the state of education more than normally alarming. During the year private schools, for example, were sharply criticized—luxurious Lawrenceville’s Headmaster Allan V. Heely went so far as to call them an expensive and perhaps useless luxury. Independent old Mr. Sargent seconded the motion, thereby braved brickbats from his patrons.

This year resilient Oldster Sargent had most fun parading the folklore of U. S. education. Most fantastic folkway, lie found, is commencement, “the greatest folk festival the world has known.” Counting graduates, mothers, fathers, sisters, cousins and aunts, some 25,000,000 U. S. citizens take part in this festival each June

(although at Harvard, where it started, commencement originally was a celebration beginning the school year).

Caps and gowns (which became academic garb when they were prescribed for medieval scholars to cover their rags, are still worn daily at such places as Oxford and Fordham University) came into fashion at U. S. commencements soon after the Civil War, Mr. Sargent reported. Today an elaborate code, to which 95 schools and colleges adhere, governs the gowns’ sizes, colors, materials. Black is for liberal arts graduates, white or grey for high school, blue for normal school, pink for music, lemon for library science, silver-grey for oratory, maize for agriculture. Harvard has its own code, uses varicolored crow’s-feet on the front panels of gowns instead of velvet hood trimmings to distinguish separate orders of graduates.

The custom whereby alumni wear exhibitionist costumes at commencement reunions originated at Yale. Mr. Sargent found. “The depth of puerility,” said he, was reached at Harvard’s ’38 commencement, when some alumni marched in barrels as economic royalists.

“Commencement,” concluded Porter Sargent, “has become a large scale piece of advertising, for prestige and money. . . . Commencements at the older universities are competitive as to spectacular features, speakers who will secure the headlines. and finally in the result of it all, the announcement of funds. … If these college commencements were reduced to their former modest simplicity, if representatives of great financial houses and industries were to play a lesser role, the annual increment would probably fall off. …

“Alma Mater, the great American goddess—flatulent old bawd!”

* Number of people involved: 31,000,000.

† Mr. Sargent thisyear found his 1,190-page handbook too small to contain his views, decided to restrict his handbook to education and publish a separate 400-page volume of general comment—Human Affairs.