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A Successful School. William and Joan Hinton are the children of Mrs. Carmelita Hinton, an Omaha-born schoolteacher who in 1935 founded the Putney School in southeastern Vermont. William and Joan attended the prep school, which their mother ran so successfully that she attracted the children of some of America's most alert and influential people. Mrs. Hinton believed that the revolution John Dewey had wrought in the elementary schools could and should be extended to secondary schools. She wanted "to experiment, to pioneer, to break through some of the traditional ideas of education for adolescents."
Mrs. Hinton is liked and respected in her Vermont community. Last week one of her neighbors, the daily Brattleboro Reformer, wrote of her children: "It is beyond our capacity even to try to guess what motivates a man like William Hinton, who left Putney some ten years ago on a journey into world Communism in which his colossal faith in the infallibility of his own judgment has helped exile his sister . . . brought heartache to his mother and has helped create an unnecessary shadow over the [school]. The only answer, and one which still does not explain the working of such a man's mind, is that when the tentacles of Communism wrap themselves around an individual they also draw an iron curtain between him and the eternal verities."