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Exemplary Education. The lure of all this has brought Andover a seasoned faculty (average age: 46) with only six bachelors as compared with 95 married men, reversing the traditional ratio and filling the campus with children. The teachers are formidable men. A young housemaster may be not only a Ph.D. in classics or physics, but also an ex-paratrooper or Harvard crew captain.
From his squeaky-voiced arrival to his bass-toned departure, the Andover boy (or "man") gets an exemplary education. Basic diploma requirements: four years of English, stressing expository writing; three years of math and a foreign language; 1½ years of science and history; one year of religion and one of art or music, plus four electives, from Russian to anthropology. Ambitious boys take five major courses a year. Science stresses what scientists do. In biology, senior projects run from slide talks on bog plant life to cutting out a chicken's bones and reassembling them.
Foreign languages begin without books, and English is banned from the classroom. For nine hours a week, 14-year-olds answer one question after another in high-speed French or Spanish. In senior English, the visitor who hated college Chaucer is delighted to hear raucous laughter as Dudley Fitts translates the "pleyn speken" Prologue. In the science honors (physics-chemistry) course of Edmond G. Hammond Jr., a brilliant young teacher with icy blue eyes, he listens raptly to sneers at "routine thought" and generalizations that are "pretty messy."
Sink or Swim. Yet the boys and their keepers are not intimate. Andover is no place for teacher's pets. A "man" stands alone on his marks and muscles. All year the juniors (first-year boys) toil at attaining "silver" standards in physical tests, including a "drownproofing" course (copied by the Peace Corps) with a rugged exam—staying afloat for 35 minutes with hands tied behind back. The pride a boy feels when he succeeds is the fruit of Andover's unofficial motto: "Sink or swim."
Every afternoon the juniors spend two hours with the lower-middlers, upper-middlers and seniors on the vast playing fields—a sea of runners, jumpers, kickers. All get a chance to excel at one of 17 sports, if not on a varsity team, then on one of four intramural teams in each sport—the red-shirted Romans, the green Gauls, the grey Greeks, the orange Saxons. Belonging grows as the morning teacher turns afternoon coach, yelling, "Tail down, Jones!" It mounts in a delirious rally before the Exeter game, and if victory comes, in a yowling torchlight parade and huge campus bonfire, On to Abbot Academy!
"Almost a Sin." All this bespeaks the enduring Andover, which is run on nothing more complicated than the primitive idea of ordeal. But the ordeal is far different from the one old grads remember. Everyone still looks up to the "jock" or man with a major "A." But these days the jock has to be a lot more—an actor, a proctor, a Merit scholar. The balanced hero is in. The snob is out. "A million kids are dying to get into Andover," says one lower-middler in a falsetto voice. "A guy who just mopes his way through, boy, that's almost a sin."