GOOD prep schools have in common one audacious aim: to be parent and teacher at the same time. To handle the parental role, they stress sports, discipline, manners, religion and democracy. To teach well, they accent intimate learning in classes that average nine students compared with the public school average of 28. Avoiding distractions, they generally offer spartan living on spacious, tradition-encrusted campuses, most of them in the Northeast. Despite these uniform methods, the schools that operate 24 hours a day come in all shapes and sizes:
Big (519 boys) Deerfield has the last of the strong headmasters, shaping a school in his own image: Frank L. Boyden, 83. He runs the school without speedup courses or language labs, does not publish a catalogue or even a rule book. The "Little Fellow" (5 ft. 6 in.) calls himself "a country sort of person who likes boys," is famous for second chances: "If a boy needs to be expelled, he needs even more to stay here." Even bigger (630) Lawrenceville, in New Jersey, tackles size with a house system that keeps same-age students together for eating, sleeping, studying. Tuition hits $3,000 a year, but boys easily slide into Princeton, where Lawrenceville has more freshmen than any other school. Bigness is solved at Indiana's Culver Military Academy (840 boys), now a topkick prep school, by insisting that "discipline is essential to the learning process."
Staying small is the idea at Groton, which is far less snobbish than people think. Episcopal Groton, which schooled F.D.R., has 34 teachers for 229 boys (including three Negroes). Seniors supervise younger boys. All sleep in dormitory cubicles, wash in plastic (once tin) basins, the legacy of Founder Endicott Peabody's muscular Christianity. "The important thing is not training a boy's brain," says Groton's headmaster, the Rev. John Crocker. "It's having a decent guy when you're done."
The so-called "St. Grottlesex"* schools are supposedly ultra-swank as well as churchy (Episcopal). Yet Kent treats its 292 boys like poverty-vowing lay brothers. They make beds, wait tables, scrub floors, do K.P., and the consequent saving is passed on in the form of sliding-scale tuition. Despite its monasticism, Kent recently opened a "coordinate" school for 200 girls, who even attend some classes with boys.
That idea is old at the two Milton Academies (291 boys, 181 girls), whose blueblood alumni include Cabots, Saltonstalls and a Kennedy (Bobby). The fact that John F. Kennedy went to Choate, where the class of '35 voted him "most likely to succeed," helped deluge that already top school last year with a record 2,400 inquiries for 155 places. Other Choate alumni: Adlai Stevenson, Weatherly Skipper Bus Mosbacher, Lyricist Alan Jay Lerner, Novelist John Dos Passos, Playwright Edward Albee (see THEATER).