John Andrew Rice is a maverick among U.S. educators. By his own account, only one man ever understood him—old Philosopher John Dewey. A stormy petrel wherever he taught, Dr. Rice quarreled with the University of Nebraska, was kicked out of Rollins College (TIME, June 19, 1933), two years ago abruptly severed relations with his own dream college, North Carolina's Black Mountain. Now the professor is back in the news with a Harper prize book, I Came Out of the 18th Century ($3). His brooding, mordant autobiography reveals him as a brilliant critic of teaching and an acid critic of teachers.
At Rollins, where he scandalized folks by going swimming in white trunks, and at Black Mountain, where he used to take long walks in the woods with an escort of five dogs, roly-poly Professor Rice cut a slightly comic figure. But there was nothing comic about his mind. A preacher's son, nephew of U.S. Senator "Cotton Ed" Smith, John Rice grew up in a family of South Carolina individualists and became one himself, a rebel among rebels. He was a star pupil at Tennessee's famed Webb School, breezed through Tulane in three years, went to Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar. Then he turned itinerant pedagogue (successively at Webb School, the University of Chicago, Nebraska, New Jersey College for Women, Rollins, Black Mountain).
Having thus spanned a half-century and a cross section of U.S. education, Professor Rice, who knows where the educational skeletons, real and imaginary, are hidden, has turned state's evidence against his profession. His story is peopled with extraordinary characters.
Webb. Of the two brothers who founded Webb School, Sawney and John, Sawney became the better known, but John Rice does not think much of him. "All that the founder of a new school needed [in the post-Civil War South]," he says, "was a little.learning and a lot of physical strength. Sawney . . . had both." A tough man, he sometimes came to class with a scratch on his hand and "allowed it to bleed unnoticed as the boys sat in awe at the brave show."
Sawney was responsible for the school's famed, eccentric rules: no boy might climb a fence on the grounds unless he built a stile over it (there were stiles every 20 feet); a boy who pulled a leaf had to plant a new tree; boys might fight, but never before onlookers—spectators always got a thrashing from Sawney.
But quiet Brother John ("Old Jack") Webb was the greatest teacher Dr. Rice ever met. Webb had a wisdom bump on his forehead the size of half a walnut, used to sit talking to himself and trimming his grey beard with pocket scissors. He taught Greek, English, history, math, everything —sitting in a split-bottom chair and gently posing riddles to his pupils. Says Dr. Rice: "More Rhodes Scholars came from Webb School than from any other in the world."
Tulane. Rice says of his alma mater: "The diploma said I was a baccalaris artium, and when the president handed it to me he welcomed me into the 'company of educated men.' They were both liars."