Education: Breaking Ground

In the memory of many of its “old boys,” who have gone on to all sorts of success in life, Connecticut’s Kent School still looms as New England’s closest approach to a Tibetan lamasery. For years the one entrance to Kent from town was a narrow bridge spanning the Housatonic River; girls crossed it with approximately the same frequency as Martians. Inside was an austere male world of study created in 1906 by the late Rev. Frederick H. Sill, a white-robed monastic priest of the Protestant Episcopal Order of the

Holy Cross. It took gruff, brilliant Misogynist Sill 34 years to consent to Kent’s first dance. At another dance, Father Sill himself played the fiddle—interrupting himself periodically to give overexuberant couples a smart rap with his bow.

Last week Kent’s mission (“to produce soundly educated Christian citizens”) was expanded in a way that would almost surely have left Father Sill blinking. On a bucolic, 600-acre farm a mere five miles and one mountain away from the Kent campus, groundbreaking ceremonies were held for a new girls’ annex. By autumn of 1960, the first 100 girls (aged 14 to 15) will join Kent’s 292 boys.

The new annex will be a “coordinate” branch of Kent, will have its own faculty (half women), and will slowly swell to a full four forms by adding one new class each year. For two years there will be no mixed classes, and after that only in some honors courses. And there will be few if any finishing-school touches. Kent’s famed “selfhelp” system—which allows the school to save $100,000 a year on maintenance and scale tuition to a boy’s means—will apply to the girls too. They will rise at 6:05, make their beds, sweep dormitories and classrooms, wash dishes and mow lawns. The one concession to femininity so far: for arriving at breakfast after 6:45 a.m., the girls may get less strenuous punishment than the boys’ fast “jog around the triangle.”

Man behind the girls is Kent’s rector and headmaster, the Rev. John 0. Patterson, a 51-year-old, Nevada-born Episcopal priest who began as an M.I.T.-trained architect, spent 15 years in Midwest parishes before coming to Kent in 1949. No monastic—he has a wife and four children—Father Patterson has a hard-headed reason for backing the girls’ annex. In today’s world, says he, “men have to work effectively with women. Women are people as much as men.”