Education: Airprep

At well-mannered Berkshire School, the students talk increasingly with their hands. They all have the air-talk habit. A handsome New England prep school at Sheffield, Mass., Berkshire this year generated unwonted zip in its student body by teaching them to fly as a regular part of the curriculum. This week 40 fledglings in this pioneering airprep school were agog over the first of their number to take his test for a pilot’s license. With 35 hours of soloing, 17-year-old James D. Geier of Cincinnati had beaten out his headmaster. Headmaster Albert Keep still has only 22.

It was mainly by accident that Berkshire scooped its neighbors with its popular flying course. Six months ago lively young Headmaster Keep’s chief hobby was small-boat racing. Then he met Robert Douglas Wright Vroom, who had been forced by war regulations to move his Lufbery* Flying School from Willingford, Conn, (where he had taught Yale-men) to Tracy Field, near Berkshire. Result: Vroom and Keep teamed up. One of the first to enroll in their cooperative flying course was Headmaster Keep himself.

To find time for flying, Berkshire has had to drop Virgil, fine arts and ancient history. But it still requires U.S. history, English, mathematics, chemistry, physics, foreign languages. And it offers a thorough ground course in aeronautical science.

Three afternoons a week the boys who have elected the flying course drive out to Lufbery in a dilapidated bus. While waiting their turn to go up with Vroom and his licensed instructors, they do academic lessons under Keep’s supervision. Back at school, they go over the day’s experiences for the benefit of the younger students.

Says Headmaster Keep: “It’s a great success. The boys are thoroughly serious. They expect to serve in the armed forces.” Berkshire’s motto is Pro vita, non pro schola discimus (“We learn not for school but for life”).

-Named for the LaFayette Escadrille’s Raoul Lufbery, French-born Wallingforder killed in combat in 1918.