Learning Without Drudgery

Though Cambridge, Mass, was the home town of three famous colleges (Harvard, Radcliffe, M.I.T.), its public schools were backward. In protest, Harvard's famed Philosopher William Ernest Hocking pulled his children out of them. On the sun porch of his home, in 1914, he and a Harvard colleague founded a school of their own. They and their wives taught and ran it themselves for a few years; but Shady Hill School grew too fast for them. It was then that Philosopher Hocking & Co. went looking for somebody to take over, and found a golden-haired schoolmarm named Katharine Taylor.

Last week Katharine Taylor was celebrating her 25th anniversary as its director. Shady Hill now has 350 students, owns 15 unpretentious buildings clustered on the edge of the Charles River, has become one of the top private elementary schools in the U.S.

The people who sent their children there were a measure of its success: they included college presidents (Compton of M.I.T., Conant of Harvard, Carmichael of Tufts); bishops (Dun of Washington, Nash of Massachusetts); professors (Harvard Law School's Thomas Reed Powell, Philosopher Alfred North Whitehead).

Herself a product of progressive education, 58-year-old Director Taylor wants Shady Hill to be known as just a "good school" rather than a progressive one. She stresses the classics, teaches the three Rs, allows no classroom anarchy. But her theory is a progressive truism: "When learning becomes a drudgery, it usually ceases to be productive."

Shady Hill kids learn spelling and the multiplication tables by rote--but only after they have been beguiled into understanding the necessity for them. They first find out about arithmetic by adding and subtracting blocks, later by planning railroad trips in dollars, miles, and hours. They study science by first "exploring" the subject: they weigh snow, melt it, keep daily logs of weather and temperature.

No Card, High Grades. Each year the kids concentrate on a different period of history (third grade, Norse; fourth, Greek, etc.), study its history, literature, painting, music, sculpture. But above all, they learn how all these subjects are "related." The Taylor theory: "To study 12th Century sculpture without realizing the tremendous force of the religious movements of the Middle Ages would be as blind as to study a maple leaf with no realization . . . of how it grew."

Her students, who never receive a report card until the eighth grade, seem to do well after they leave her. Last year four Shady Hill alumnae were graduated from Radcliffe, and all four were Phi Beta Kappa.

Shady Hill teachers do even better. After a few years of Miss Taylor's teacher-training program, several have become directors of similar schools. One of them, Mrs. Sebastian Hinton, founded a school of her own: Vermont's successful Putney School. Through them Teacher Taylor's methods have spread. Says she quietly: "We feel much less tentative."

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