PREP SCHOOLS

To the Editors of the CRIMSON:

Dean Sizer of the School of Education, in his recent call for federal aid to private preparatory schools, made an assumption which the world of 1967 denies: that such institutions serve any real educational purpose at all.

Once upon a time there was a definite need for schools which offered preparation for college, public education not being adequate enough nor tutorial education uniform enough to meet the universities' requirements. For this reason (as well as to convert boys into moral men, fit for the best banking houses and clubs of the Eastern Seaboard) the Endicott Peabodys of the world opened up their schools in forgotten corners of New England. There they provided a needed educational service for several generations.

But today no such situation exists. Public education in the United States is second to none, and no one is foolish enough to assert that people attend prep schools because of educational equality back home. For, indeed, where do the bulk of such students come? From Brookline and Glen Cove, from Darien and Shaker Heights--the very areas with some of the best public secondary schools in the nation. The graduates of these schools come to Cambridge and New Haven and find themselves in no way less "prepared" than their neighbors who raced off to what Dean Sizer calls "independent" schools.

We are, therefore, forced to admit that today people send their sons to prep schools for purely social reasons: as a sign of economic achievement, as a perpetuation of a family tradition, or as plain and simple snobbism.

I believe the prep schools themselves know this; hence their great desire in recent years to justify their existence. A handful of promising students from Roxbury or Harlem is taken in to manifest social awareness--at the same time a promising football player from suburban Boston is taken in to get him ready to meet his Ivy League college's minimum scholastic standards while he gratifies the old grads on Saturday afternoons in the Fall.

I contend that national educational quality would be immeasurably better served by taking the money now spent on private preparatory schools as well as whatever amounts Dean Sizer hopes the federal government will spend in aid to these obviously impoverished institutions and give them instead to the schools truly in need of help--in the slums and rural areas. The $170,000 to be spent by the Danforth Foundation for its "study" of prep schools alone would pay for a full year's improved operation of the public school systems in any one of a number of counties in West Virginia or for salaries for upwards of twenty excellent high school teachers in Watts.

And the penalty if the government does not aid prep schools as Dean Sizer wishes? They may have to increase tuition. The time is long past when the nation can cry over potential hardships to the rich. But the time is ripe to aid education where aid is truly needed, and that need lies far from the soccer fields or our "independent" schools. Peter C. Poole '68