Education: How to Think About Schools

A paradoxical reason for sending children to private prep schools was offered last week to a Manhattan conference of headmasters and headmistresses. In clipped Massachusetts accents, CBS Newscaster Quincy Howe, an alumnus of Newport’s swank St. George’s School and son of Beacon Hill Biographer Mark A. De Wolfe Howe, declared:

“Private preparatory schools can produce radicals. Pupils who have become accustomed to wealth, fashion and snobbishness can resist such blandishments thereafter. Perhaps that is why . . Franklin Delano Roosevelt [a Grottie] is what he is.”