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In a gentle, deliberate way, Dr. Drury has broadened and stimulated life at St. Paul's in his 15-year administration. His personality has had a compelling and retentive effect upon the alumni, who are now organized and have assisted in the establishment of scholarships and an endowment fund. Tall and angular of frame, sandy-haired and lantern-jawed, he has the mien of an old school schoolman, beneath which lie the combined capacities of militant churchman, practical moralist and sagacious promoter. He is a familiar figure not only on his school grounds but in the colleges and offices of his old boys, with whom he keeps in closest touch.
Dr. Peabody has been described as "an American with an English school and university training . . . an all round athlete, and yet a churchman; a scholar and yet a very graceful and sophisticated man of the world." Groton is his life-work as St. Mark's is Dr. Thayer's. The latter, "an accomplished churchman and a successful and tactful manager," took his chair in 1894.
There are in the U. S. no twin peaks of secondary education like Eton and Harrow, whereon hang all the pedagogical law and whose masters are the prophets. There has been no legendary "Arnold of Rugby" or "Sanderson of Oundle"* in the U. S. nor will there be. So many of our larger secondary schools were founded contemporaneously, and they soon multiplied so rapidly that though each school developed along its own lines, the special character of none had time to impress itself upon the public mind as a national institution before the coming of the public high school system, which relegated private education to a special, a subordinate place in the democracy's pedagogical program. It is most improbable that the appointment of a new headmaster at The Hill, Lawrenceville, Hotchkiss, Taft or Exeter would occasion the widespread editorial comment that greeted the appointment of Dr. Cyril Norwood, master of Marlborough College, as first lay master of Harrow, last month in England.
But Dr. Peabody seems justified in his opinion that U. S. schools and schoolmasters are gaining in prestige and appreciation as "dominant" influences upon the modern boy. The fact that more members of Harvard 1925 went into teaching than into law bears him out. And the younger men now going into teaching are men of ability. No longer can it be said that those who can, do; while those who can't, teach.
The case of the youngest headmaster in the U. S. is in point. Twenty years ago Father Frederick H. Sill of the Order of the Holy Cross (Episcopal) procured an old farmhouse near Kent, Conn., enrolled 18 pupils and three masters, founded Kent School. The first night of school the headmaster cooked scrambled eggs which the boys served, the beginning of a regimen of self-help that has continued until today, when Kent is a flourishing school of 200 boys. Kent teaches self-reliance, directness of purpose and simplicity of life, in a quiet rural community.