Education: Country Day School

Middle-class Americans like to point with pride to the great U.S. system of public education—but when they can afford it they prefer to send their children to private schools.

One kind of private school is neither as private nor as expensive as boarding school. A pioneer country day school, New York City’s Riverdale, celebrated its 35th anniversary last week, affording a good illustration of a branch of private education that is now blooming despite hard times and war.

Riverdale is as authentic an example of U.S. suburbia as diagonal parking and the 7:53. It reclines on a well-groomed, rocky hillside where The Bronx meets Westchester, gives glimpses of itself to commuters motoring by on the Henry Hudson Parkway. Its broad playing fields and ivied brick buildings, countrified by fieldstone fireplaces, are shaded by well-kept maples and oaks, bordered by neat shrubbery. At 9 each morning six big school busses and more than a dozen station wagons and cars roll up, unload well-scrubbed tots and adolescents from Bronxville, Yonkers, Tuckahoe, Riverdale, The Bronx, Manhattan. At 5 each afternoon, they roll home again.

Small, neat, pink-cheeked Headmaster Frank Hackett launched Riverdale on a shoestring. As a young assistant headmaster of a Manhattan school, he brought a group of small boys home from an outing one day, found an older boy on the school steps dead drunk.

Frank Hackett thereupon decided to start a school in a wholesome atmosphere. By having his pupils commute, instead of keeping them as boarders, he proposed to combine the advantages of country school life and “the steadying influences of a good home.” Encouraged by Columbia University’s President Nicholas Murray Butler, Hackett sank his capital, $500, into a quarter’s rent on an old Riverdale house, where he opened his school in the fall of 1907 with twelve students. He canvassed apartment houses for pupils and was one of the first headmasters to use display advertisements.

In addition to the boys’ school, Riverdale now has a girls’ school, a school for tots, a music school, a total enrollment of 456, of whom there are only 75 boarders. Day boys pay $760 a year, boarders $1,330.

Headmaster Hackett puts his boys through a stiff curriculum. Nearly all of them go on to college: 85% of them get by the College Boards at the first try. Riverdale musicians give a concert every year in Manhattan’s Town Hall; until the war Riverdale boys toured Europe on bicycles. Two Riverdale boys, musicians’ sons and themselves musicians, Leopold Mannes and Leopold Godowsky Jr., were pioneers in the development of color photography.

Though not the oldest of the U.S.’s 250 country day schools (Baltimore’s Gilman preceded it by ten years), Riverdale was an early model for a new group of schools that now includes some of the finest and most famed in the U.S.—Winnetka’s North Shore Country Day, New York’s Horace Mann, Philadelphia’s Friends Central, St. Louis’ Country Day and John Burroughs, Cambridge’s Browne & Nichols, Wilmington’s Tower Hill, Brooklyn’s Polytech.