Education: New Order for Kent

At the turn of the century, a restless, energetic young Episcopal monk of the Order of the Holy Cross (TIME, Aug. 20) had an ambition which he knew would cost money: to provide a decent, religious, private-school education for poor boys of good families. He got his Father Superior’s permission, then mailed out appeals which would have brought him $250,000 had everybody contributed. He got $300. “Well,” sighed Father Frederick Herbert Sill, “if the Lord wants me to start a school on $300, I’ll do it.”

In 1901, with an inexperienced three-man faculty and 18 boys, Kent School opened its doors in a ramshackle Connecticut farmhouse. Father Sill was vowed to lifelong poverty, chastity and obedience, but where Kent School was involved, he proved a shameless beggar, a tireless publicist, a resourceful promoter and a born teacher of boys.

In worldly ways, “Pater’s” school was a high success. Rich & poor alike partook of his simple religious faith and his exuberant spirit. The boys made their own beds, waited on tables, worked in the kitchen, did practically all the physical work of the school. This “Kent system” became famed in the secondary-school world and was aped, in varying degrees, by many another school. Kent’s oarsmen, coached by Pater himself (an ex-coxswain at Columbia), rowed at many a famed Henley regatta in England.

By 1941, when Pater was ready to retire, Kent was a robust school with an enrollment of 299 students, and a handsome collection of colonial buildings beside the Housatonic River, worth some $1½ million. Boys still paid what their parents could afford (from nothing to $1,500 a year) but Kent was very much on the map of Eastern preparatory schools.

The nature of Kent’s success was not an unmixed pleasure to the fathers of the Holy Cross, whose rules require that they should eat and live for the most part separately from the world, coming from seclusion only to perform certain tasks. When Father Sill’s broken health forced him to retire, Holy Cross provided Kent with a successor in young, studious Father William Scott Chalmers, but in 1943 decided to hand grownup, self-sufficient Kent over to its trustees. Father Chalmers, by special permission, stayed on as headmaster. Father Chalmers soon discovered the impossibility of fitting his Order’s cloistered rules to his job as a busy headmaster. But Kent’s trustees, clinging to the school’s tradition, were unwilling to accept someone who was not a monk.

Last week Father Chalmers announced a solution that satisfied nearly everybody. Holy Cross would release him from its Order, thus severing its last connection with the school. Then Father Chalmers will join an Anglican Order, the Oratory of the Good Shepherd, which is dedicated as deeply to poverty, chastity and obedience, but requires that every member devote himself to some job. Kent boys would notice only one change: instead of the white robes of his old Order, Father Chalmers will now don a black cassock.