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Moral Equivalent. Hahn used the perils of the nearby sea and mountains to make Gordonstoun unique among British public schools. Headmaster Robert G. Chew, who took over when Hahn retired in 1952, continues the pattern. Last week 395 boys were busy ramming small boats through rough surf, manning coast guard lookouts, spotting forest fires and assaulting craggy cliffs, doing the school's chores and striving mightily to win badges for moral and physical fitness. Hahn is sure that Gordonstoun has found William James's "moral equivalent of war." Says Hahn: "The last war proved a wonderful channel to canalize the spirit of adventure of the young, and to develop their courage and physical and mental resourcefulness. In peace, there is no means of doing this."
Gordonstoun's method is to give each boy a "training plan" that he is honor-bound to fulfill. Daily items: a dawn run on an empty stomach, two cold showers, calisthenics, "N.E.B.M." (no eating between meals), room cleaning, diary keeping, and silence during free periods to foster "intellectual life."
Unlike many British public schools, Gordonstoun is free of junior toadies and senior bullies. The harshest punishment is a solitary ten-mile walk. The school also curbs excessive academic competition, ranks academic achievement far behind such official report-card items as a boy's "ability to follow out what he believes to be the right course in the face of discomfort, hardships, dangers, mockery, boredom, skepticism and impulses of the moment." Striving to mix fishermen's sons with noblemen's sons, it sends more graduates to the Royal Navy and the merchant service than to universities.
Atlantic Colleges. Gordonstoun's success inspired the equally successful Outward Bound schools in England and Wales, where boys come each month from all over the Commonwealth to test themselves in rigorous physical trials on land and water. Hahn now has an even more ambitious idea: 14 "Atlantic colleges," a NATO-inspired chain of campuses from the U.S. to Turkey, where boys aged 16 to 18 would combine university preparation with training to "equip a young man morally and physically to help his fellows." Last month private sponsors raised money to buy the first campus, St. Donat's Castle in Wales, onetime pleasure dome of U.S. Newspaper Tycoon William Randolph Hearst. Due to open next year, St. Donat's will use the Gordonstoun theory throughout its curriculum.
Philosopher in San Antonio
In San Antonio every Sunday morning, television viewers brace for an intellectual earthquake: Sidney Thomas Greenburg, 43, president of Roman Catholic Incarnate Word College. Greenburg bills himself not as teacher, preacher, lecturer or entertainer, but boldly as philosopher.
Talking with force, passion, glee and anger, he bucks for integration in education, which to him (though he backs racial integration too) means denouncing specialization in teachers, students and people at large. A bristling individual, he is concerned that "we are today witnessing the assassination of the individual person." Injecting Aristotelian logic into a discussion of pro football or Karl Marx, he has built up a Sunday intellectual ghetto audience of 75,000 listeners.