Education: Roxbury’s 300th

The trustees of a suburban Boston preparatory school were looking for a new headmaster. One candidate they considered was an alumnus then teaching chemistry at Harvard. They rejected him because of his “youth and inexperience.” Three months later the alumnus, James Bryant Conant, was chosen president of Harvard. The pick-&-choosy school, Roxbury Latin, is this week celebrating its 300th anniversary. Alumnus Conant, proud of his old school’s high standards, will be there to help celebrate.

Roxbury Latin is the oldest independent, continuously functioning school in the U.S.* Its founder was Preacher John Eliot, famed as the “Apostle to the Indians.” Using the English grammar school as a model, he inaugurated the classical curriculum and the spartan, democratic spirit which have been Roxbury earmarks ever since. Roxbury alumni include General Joseph Warren, a onetime headmaster, who sent Paul Revere on his ride, led the fight at Lexington, and was killed at Bunker Hill; James Pierpont, principal founder of Yale; Harvard’s great literary scholars, Charles H. Grandgent and George Lyman Kittredge. At one time in the 1920s ten Roxbury alumni were presidents of U.S. colleges and universities.

Against this anticlassical age Roxbury still stands like a small rock. All students are required to take five years of Latin, may take a sixth. The six-year curriculum also includes science, history, mathematics, English, Greek, modern languages. The only other courses are ethics for first-year students, cartography for seniors. Roxbury’s present Headmaster George Norton Northrop, proud of his boys’ consistent high marks in college entrance examinations, is calmly confident that the prep-school trend is “away from so-called progressive education.” High point of the celebration this week was to be a performance (but in English) of Aristophanes’ Clouds. Students dressed as roosters would stand behind bars and expound the theme of education-for-its-own sake: “The greatest of all blessings is to live and think more clearly than the vulgar herd.”

* Harvard (1636), Boston Latin School (1635), and the Collegiate School of New York (1638) are older, but none was started independently of church or state, and all three closed down during the Revolution.