Between the red-&-gold covers of Porter Sargent's famed catalog of 4,000 private schools, many an undecided parent seeks an educational niche for his offspring. Schoolmasters browse through it to get information about their competitors. But Private Schools' readership is by no means confined to these two classes. Wiseacres know that practically anybody can find something to amuse and instruct him in this fascinating volume, whose 20th Anniversary Edition was published in Boston last week.
A lively, lean-faced, high-collared old New Englander is Porter Sargent, who as advertising and employment agent, adviser and critic, sits firmly astride the far-flung world of U. S. private secondary education. Although he has not willingly set foot in a school since, upon leaving Harvard in 1896, he taught a while at Cambridge's staid Browne & Nichols, Porter Sargent ranks today as the private school industry's No. 1 lay figure. As such, he annually delivers himself in Private Schools of a long and dogmatic preface on the worldwide State of Education, includes his sprightly, if iconoclastic, views on lots of other things. Excerpts from this year's 150-page sound-off:
"Once I collected definitions of education by great writers and others. It made a thick folder . . . beautifully sentimental. The safest generalization is that education is what we want to do to children, or to have done to them for us, which would make them more like us than they otherwise would be."
On Eugenics: "Hitler has inspirited his people just as Mussolini de-Wopped the Wops. Breeding has been encouraged, the birth rate has risen, and they are improving the quality. Here in this country ignorance and prejudice prevent improvement and largely restrict births to the less fit. . . ."
On Women: -"The desexed female bee workers throw the drones out and sting them to death. The white ants don't even trouble to rear them. Well, we have started on the way in our public school system. Once boys were taught by school masters. Now we insist on supposedly sexless females, and if they marry normally we throw them out."
These and other reflections, included in a volume which sells 100,000 copies at $6 apiece, emerge as regularly as the dogwood each spring from No. n Beacon Street, Boston. At that address is located Porter Sargent's crowded little office. There he, with an assistant and a half-dozen stenographers, besides publishing Private Schools, personally tells parents where to find schools, teachers where to find work, trustees where to find headmasters. He also places school advertising in magazines as well as in the rear of his yearly handbook.