History of St. Mark's School

, spans nearly a century and a half since its founding in 1865.

Founding by Joseph Burnett

Joseph Burnett, a wealthy resident of Southborough, founded St. Mark's School in 1865, reportedly counseled by Dr. Henry Coit of St. Paul's School of Concord, New Hampshire, who told Burnett that with six sons to educate, he would do well to found a school, instead of sending them north to St. Paul's. Episcopalian St. Mark's is thus one of the earlier New England schools founded on the British model, as opposed to New England academies such as Phillips Academy and Phillips Exeter Academy, both founded nearly a century earlier. St. Mark's initial board of trustees was composed of members of many prominent Boston families, as well as many eminent Episcopal churchmen, and from the first the school attracted many members of Boston Brahmin and New York Knickerbocker families. St. Mark's continues to maintain close ties to the Episcopal Church, although St. Mark's great headmaster William Greenough Thayer admitted a limited number of Jewish boys as well. The first African-American student didn't enroll until 1964. [ St. Mark's School, A Centennial History (Hall, Stinehour Press, Lunenberg, VT, 1967]

The Arrival of William Greenough Thayer

Despite the elite social standing of its early student body, the school faced initial challenges, including financial difficulties and the instability of having four different headmasters in its first seventeen years of existence, followed by the appointment of William E. Peck in 1882. Peck was a controversial headmaster, often in conflict with the trustees, until 1894, when he resigned and founded Pomfret School, taking a number of students and teachers with him. It wasn't until the inspired appointment of Headmaster William Greenough Thayer (who had taught for five years at slightly younger rival Groton School) in 1894 that St. Mark's began to experience stability. Thayer led the school until 1930, bringing it out of its initial financial difficulties, expanding the campus infrastructure dramatically, and eventually retiring just as the school faced the challenges of the Crash of 1929 and its impact on the student body. St. Mark's – and Thayer – were national institutions by the time of his departure from the school. News of his pending retirement was reported by Time Magazine in 1929 as an event of national significance, which to the nation's social elite it then was. [ Time Magazine, "Twill" December 2, 1929]

The Thayer period was marked throughout by growth, notably in the acreage of the school (from the original 50 acres of Burnett's time to the convert|250|acre|km2 the school possesses today). Additionally, new dormitories, faculty housing, school fields, and a boathouse were constructed, with all school core facilities kept “under one roof” in St. Mark's unique English-inspired cloister construction. Thayer's popularity and knack for attracting socially-well-connected families proved durable. His admissions policy, modeled on that of English Public Schools, prioritized admissions on the basis of when one's parents had “put one's name down”. In practice this led over time to a school dominated by children of alumni – and not coincidentally, heavily dominated by the sons of inherited wealth. (Girls were not admitted until 1974.) St. Mark's social standing did not pass unnoticed in wider America. F. Scott Fitzgerald, in his classic 1920 novel “This Side of Paradise”, identified St. Mark's as a school which “..recruited from Boston and the Knickerbocker families of New York.” This was certainly the reputation. [ F. Scott Fitzgerald, This Side of Paradise, (New York, Scribners, 1920)]

Thayer's academic principles were classical and conservative. Teachers – for many years almost universally bachelors, called “masters,” who lived in spartan quarters with the boys in the dorms – focused their rote instruction heavily on preparation for Harvard, Yale, and Princeton, which during this period accepted almost every single St. Marker. St. Mark's students studied Latin and Ancient Greek to the exception of virtually everything else, and modern subjects such as science, modern history, and art were virtually unknown. Indeed, St. Mark's first art teacher, who taught from 1924 to 1960, at one point simultaneously taught at St. Mark's, St. Paul's School, and Groton School, devoting one day a week at each institution. Later in his career he devoted more teaching time to St. Mark's. [Reported in "St. Mark's School - A Centennial History, page 178]

While the arts were largely neglected, sports were heavily emphasized. In the initial years masters played with boys on the same teams, and the traditional football rivalry with Groton was slowly expanded to include the English game of “fives”, baseball, and other sports. (fives was introduced so that hockey players would have something to play when the ice wasn't good enough to support skating). St. Mark's has laid particular emphasis on ice hockey since around 1910, and has produced a number of notable and even professional players. St. Mark's has contributed to other sports as well. School legend has it that the baseball catcher's mask was invented at St. Mark's by a St. Mark's player who was protecting his broken nose by wearing a modified fencing helmet; Harvard University student Fred Thayer saw the helmet and several years later took out a patent on it.

The Parkman Period

With Thayer's retirement, Headmaster Francis Parkman was chosen to lead the school, and he initiated changes which continue to resonate. Parkman faced a conservative faculty and alumni body, and found his efforts to modernize St. Mark's a challenge. Nonetheless, he made some brilliant teaching appointments that may well have had a profound impact on American letters. Parkman brought the noted poet Richard Eberhart to the school as an English teacher from 1933-1941, and W. H. Auden for a brief appointment in 1939. Auden described St. Mark's to a friend as a school that “sets out to be a sort of American Eton”; he was reportedly struck there by the “dimness of the boys and the reverence of America for the average.” [The Newsletter of the W. H. Auden Society, September 1993, Newsletter No 10-11 (www.audensociety.org) ] Eberhart briefly memorializes Auden's time at St. Mark's with his poem: "“To W. H. Auden on his Fiftieth Birthday”" in which he mentions the school in passing.

Auden's catty views notwithstanding, a brief perusal of an old boy list quickly demonstrates that whatever St. Mark's shortcomings during this period, it was certainly not producing mediocrities. St. Mark's alumni around this time formed a virtual “Who's Who” of American achievement in a variety of endeavors. St. Mark's during this period produced two Senators, not to mention influential Congressmen, Episcopal Bishops, senior government officials, and other national leaders. Intriguingly, two of the most influential families in twentieth century American journalism, the Pulitzers and the Forbes, representing both ends of the political spectrum, have strong St. Mark's connections. While business, the law, and banking remained key professional arenas, literature was not neglected. Arguably the greatest American poet of the twentieth century, Robert Lowell, attended St. Mark's in the thirties and wrote his first published prose for student journals there. Richard Eberhart was an early mentor of Lowell, despite Lowell having never taken a class with him; their relationship continued during Lowell's time at Harvard University. Lowell's references to St. Mark's in his mature poetry are occasionally dark, sometimes grudgingly admiring, and at other times merely atmospheric. There is little doubt, however, that his education there had a profound impact upon his development as a writer.

Headmaster Parkman left the school in 1942 – to enlist in the army – and never returned, although he remained active in independent school policy all his life, eventually rising to the presidency of the National Association of Independent Schools in Boston, MA.

World War II

World War II brought dramatic changes. Some 500 St. Markers served in the military during the war, and twenty “old boys” died in the war. In 1942 Parkman was replaced by William Brewster, an Episcopal clergyman who remained only until 1947. Brewster's democratizing tendencies were abetted by exigencies of the war effort. During the war years, the school was forced to cope with labor shortages that forced students to work in dormitories and the dining hall. The maids and domestic help who vanished with the war's labor shortage never returned when faced with greater post-war opportunities. Perhaps more importantly, in the long run, the post-war educational benefits in the GI Bill democratized American higher education and swelled immeasurably the ranks of American men seeking and able to afford an Ivy League education. This changed post-war climate dramatically toughened the admissions prospects of St. Mark's graduates, as well as those of other elite prep schools, and has evolved continually up until the present day, when considerably fewer St. Markers attend Harvard, Yale, and Princeton than was once the case. [for more on this subject, see op cited, St. Mark's School - A Centennial History]

Persistent Elitism

Despite the creeping democratization, St. Mark's remained socially exclusive, elitist, and old-fashioned for some time, largely because of its intense institutional culture. Vladimir Nabokov, the Russian novelist, educated his son Dmitri there from 1947 and according to his biographer, years later “would remember his shock at the poor standards, snobbishness, and preferential treatment of the place”. Nabokov drew on Dmitri's experience there with caustic allusions to the school, both in his celebrated novel “Lolita” in which a character plays “fives” at a private school in the South of France, and in “Pnin”, where the fictional school “St. Bartholomew's” is a thinly disguised St. Mark's. [Vladimir Nabokov: the American Years.”, (Princeton, Brian Boyd, Princeton University Press, 1993) Page 122]

Headmaster Brewster disliked the clubby atmosphere of the school, reforming admission policies during his brief tenure. Famously hearing one alumnus describe St. Mark's as the best club he had ever joined, Brewster subsequently fought to make admissions merit-based, and expanded financial assistance. His successors continued this battle. The school began to focus more on academic as opposed to social merits, and by the late fifties was admitting only about one student in five. Nonetheless, it found it hard to shake its reputation as a finishing school for the social register, particularly given the persistence of many alumni who fit this mold.

The Challenge of Modernization

Edward T. "Ned" Hall became Headmaster of the school in 1968. The sixties presented traditional boarding schools with many challenges -- including irrelevance -- and the administration, faculty and trustees struggled with bringing St. Mark's out of its Victorian origins and into the 20th century during Ned Hall's tenure and thereafter. Beginning in the early 1970s, many traditional, formal requirements of school life were relaxed -- including a reduction in the number of required chapel services from six days per week to five, fewer sit down meals, a "December Week" of alternative course offerings, and awkward experiments in co-education. For faculty and students alike, such changes were unsettling given how steeped in tradition St. Mark's was. Hall announced his resignation at the beginning of the 1973-74 school year.

In 1974, Rev. Robert R."Red" Hansel, a former chaplain at St. George's School, was brought in by the trustees to effect radical institutional change -- including a more streamlined administrative structure, complete re-organization of the student living arrangements into smaller "house" units, and other initiatives which collided with the traditional and longstanding institutional culture. Mr. Hansel's four-year tenure was controversial and brief. In his memoir, "Oh The Glory Of It All", critic Sean Wilsey makes the case that St. Mark's initial handling of coeducation was bungled. Indeed, it took time to repair the damage, although modern St Mark's probably can be traced to the advent of coeducation. Girls were initially admitted in 1972 to the newly established Southborough School, a short-lived and ill-fated experiment in coordinate co-education a couple of miles away. Funded largely by St. Mark's itself, the Southborough girls' school was dissolved in 1977 and many of its students and faculty absorbed into the parent school.

Like its peer institutions, St. Mark's stuggled with the challenge of an increasingly permissive American society. Reconciling historic traditions of personal responsibility with drug and alcohol abuse was a serious threat to many New England boarding schools, and St. Mark's was no exception. This challenge came tragically to a head in the mid-1980's, when hazing was rampant, a student died in the dorms trying to get high, and a female student was abducted from her dorm by male students and raped. Sean Wilsey's critical memoir "Oh, The Glory of It All" dramatically conveys the difficult atmosphere of the school that time. In the wake of this turmoil, school administrators re-examined and reformed many policies, and worked to evolve the St. Mark's community for a more contemporary context. Discipline was tightened, personal responsibility was more effectively encouraged and actively taught, and a caring and structured environment was sought. In the process, the school dramatically expanded educational choices to include numerous electives and extracurricular activities previously unimaginable.

t. Mark's Today

In 1946, the young John F. Kennedy said "I think the success of any school can be measured by the contribution the alumni make to our national life." [Preparing for Power, (New York, Cookson & Persell, Basic Books, 1985) Page 13] By this measure, St. Mark's stands in an elite category of academic achievement. St. Mark's alumni today continue to cut a broad swathe across American society -- from CEOs such as Pepsi's and Apple's John Sculley, Whole Food's Walter Robb, to the astronaut Story Musgrave, the artist Ingolv Helland, and the Internet business publishing pioneer David Gardner, creator of the Motley Fool, a popular website. Nor has computer innovation in itself been neglected, with the photo software entrepreneur Lars Perkins -- creator of Picasa -- a relatively recent alumnus. [List of St. Mark's School alumni]

St. Mark's has retained its classical focus – indeed, even maintaining a “Classical Diploma” for classically-focused students – it has in recent years demonstrated initiative and agility as it seeks to modernize its curriculum. An example of this, given the heavy presence of former St. Markers in the banking professions, is what seems to have been the brilliant decision to found the St. Mark's Math Institute. Changes in banking, finance, and science have made math far more of a cornerstone of contemporary professional education than knowledge of Latin or Greek. For more than a century the Trustees of St. Mark's have battled between visions of the school as an elitist bastion and that of a center of elite education. In recent years the pendulum has swung from reinforcing elitism to one of education which seeks to develop future elites.

In June 2008, under the leadership of Bishop Clark Grew, the St. Mark' Board of Trustees developed a concise statement about the educational aspirations of the school. St. Mark's mission statement, as endorsed by the Board, declared that:

It remains to be seen how St. Mark's will fulfill this mission in the twenty first century. A persistent handicap remains the school's relatively limited endowment, compared to peer institutions Groton and St. Paul's. [citation needed] This situation has plagued St. Mark's for decades, despite the great wealth of many of its alumni and parents. It may well be that given the challenges prep schools are facing today, St. Mark's ability to raise its endowment will determine how it fares over the next century. On the other hand, the success of those wealthy alumni does imply that historic endowment levels have been adequate.

References

St. Mark's School

List of St. Mark's School alumni

External links

* [http://www.stmarksschool.org/ Official school website]
* [http://www.southboroughtown.com/ Town of Southborough official website]