Education: Northfield Milestone

Among the 2,300 men and women in the U. S. who run private secondary schools, unique is the position of Elliott Speer, 32, Princeton 1920; son of famed Evangelist Robert Elliott Speer. He not only conducts the largest private secondary institution in the land but as President of Northfield Schools (enrollment: 1,230) he heads two schools—Mount Hermon School for boys and Northfield Seminary for girls. These seats of learning face each other across five miles of wooded hills, separated by the Connecticut river near Northfield, one mile from the northern boundary of Massachusetts.

Fifty years ago these schools were founded by Evangelist Dwight Lyman Moody as a place where disadvantaged boys and girls might receive a preparatory education at small cost. As the institution has progressed and expanded it has lost much of its early religious flavor. It now likes to be known as a purely educational institution, being at pains to make clear that the celebrated annual Northfield Religious Conferences are merely held on the school grounds during vacations, are not part of the school year. Northfield being needy and this its semicentennial year, there is now in progress a drive for $3,000,000 to increase faculty pay, provide a teacher-retirement fund, secure upkeep for the physical property. Last week President Speer was happy to announce that one-half of the fund had been raised, that an appeal for funds had been laid before Edward Stephen Harkness, a seemingly inexhaustible source of educational charity ($26.000,000 to Yale and Harvard in three years).*

Northfield’s purpose is twofold: it provides an education for the worthy indigent, it supplements the public school facilities of backward communities. Each member of the community works some part of each day, earns 64% of his or her keep. Thus when Arthur Curtiss James gave Mount Hermon a gymnasium not long ago, the inmates turned out and filled, graded, drained, seeded a playing field which would have cost $10,000.

Of the alumni, some have done decidedly well. Among them: President Chester Irving Barnard of New Jersey Bell Telephone Co., President James Lukens McConaughy of Wesleyan University, Headmaster James Isaac Wendell of The Hill School, Radioman Lee De-Forest, Actor Glenn Hunter.

*Last week it was announced that Donor Harkness intended to give $25,000,000 more to the Pilgrim Trust “for the benefit of Britain.”