If an educational renaissance is at hand in the East, no man should feel more intimately connected herewith than Edward Stephen Harkness, Manhattan philanthropist. To help Harvard and his own Yale escape the contemporary trend towards standardized mass education, he has given them more than $20,000,000 to divide their undergraduate colleges into compact, wieldy "houses." Last week it was announced that the Harkness "house plan" would also be made available to one of the biggest U. S. preparatory schools. Mr. Harkness gave $7,000,000 to Phillips Exeter Academy.
Founded at Exeter, N. H. in 1781 by John Phillips, Exeter sends most of its graduates to Yale and Harvard. To accustom them to college house plans, Exeter's miniature house plan will: 1) Perfect a tutorial system, by increasing the number of instructors (there will be 65 for 650 boys), by dividing the boys into sections on the basis of individual ability, by teaching them in conference rooms, in a new building modeled after Dartmouth's English House, abolishing bare, formal classrooms. 2) Raise the standard of living for instructors, provide a sabbatical year for three instructors annually. 3) Make it possible for boys, teachers, advisers to reside continuously in the same house (after the first year) by building four new dormitories, administration & athletic buildings (with $1,000,000 given by Col. William Boyce Thompson).
Said Dr. Lewis Perry, Exeter's principal: "It is the greatest opportunity that has ever come to any secondary school in the world. . . . The preparatory school must now prepare its students for vital intellectual life in college."
Clucked the Harvard Crimson: "The educational liberalism of Harvard is gradually becoming the educational theory of New England."