GOD & MAN AT PREP SCHOOL

...We vice...

...But the restoration project is a complicated and conobb is the executive director of CSEE, the Coun- tentious one...

...That Age overtones...

...Howprogram...

...school, Peter Kountz, a Ph.D...

...ical elite boarding school "profoundly adopted the Christian "Shady Side should not, cannot, become a denominational faith as its organizing principle...

...At some schools religious services are not only tishness is unnecessary...

...that's fine...

...to be a divisive topic...

...He recalls that "everyone was supin a clove-like fist: posed to take religion classes each year, and even though given a gentle twist they were taught from a Catholic point of view, it didn't really feel like anyone was trying to convert non-Catholics...

...But there was a twist to the Bahai Fellowship, the Exeter Society of Friends, the Hindu tale...

...If people go to a Catholic in a mendicant's songs...

...This provided ritual, cereschool...

...GOD & MAN AT PREP SCHOOL Can religion & elite education still mix...

...Cobb adds that ditional religious vocabulary must be normative-and "since we changed our name with political and psychologi- "lowest-common- our membership has gone up cal vocabularies-equality and significantly...

...When it was proposed that the reads like the index to the Encyclopedia of World Religions...

...I really was happy that they required us to do a hundred hours of community service beThe bygone boarding-school ideal Hicks described in his fore we could graduate...

...It is an exquisite irony that some elite Catholic schools now play the role of exposing privileged students of all Apostrophe backgrounds to the "mere Christianity" (in C.S...

...It's a common atti- route rather than the required-chapel route...

...tude among parents of private-school pupils, and one that in- Whether the venue is the classroom or the chapel, there is dependent schools can't ignore...

...More and more, schools have to pick up the slack that parents drop, but we can't do it completely if we don't have some sort of chaplaincy program...

...After becoming Shady Side's president, Kountz decided to try to revive the chapel tradition...

...a movement to recover the religious heritage of private schools...

...recall, they all pledged generously to the campaign that inThe school also offers sixteen religion classes covering all cluded the chapel as its first item of business...

...When Oppen- gion to students, Vorkink says: "While I am in favor of school heimer and his wife were looking at schools for their chil- chaplaincy programs, if one has to pick where to have a redren, he said, they were not interested in a school that "had ligion requirement, I would personally go the classroom much religious content or compulsion...

...Or into the chapel...

...it a school if it shall gain the dent schools have discovered whole world, and lose its own that the "literacies" of politics soul...

...Most families are most comfortable when people are not always negotiating Hard as a hickory nut- where they come down...

...that to bring up religion will offend people, that it's going So is religion making a comeback in independent schools...

...Witness the controversy over the very name of cil for Spiritual and Ethical Education, an At- Peter Cobb's organization...

...abolished the position of chaplain, and replaced muscular Today, Shady Side is a different place, most obviously in Christianity with multiculturalism...

...The Shady Side saga speaks volumes about a little-noted corner of the continuing conversation in America about the Michael McGough is editorial page editor of the Pittsburgh PostGazette...

...Yet when Kountz floated the idea with school trustees, he recalls, the reaction was "remarkably unenthusiastic...

...The ethos would have been not Protestant or Catholic or Jewish but "truly ecumenical...

...in them, swipe quick Christopher Stoner, a recent Haverford College graduate from an Episcopal background, attended one of Woodside as your wit, gallic Priory's friendly rivals, the Sacred Heart Preparatory School (not to say galactic) in Atherton, California, where he found the yoke of Catholic a soupcon of garlic education fairly easy...

...Peter Vorkink, Even Hicks's restrained tribute to prep-school religion an Episcopal priest, is scornful of the "lowest-common-dewould strike some "old boys" as excessive...

...Just ask Peter W. Cobb...

...What he had in mind was not the old chapel service, with its overtones of Protestant privilege, but a program modeled on an arrangement at Wellesley College "where you have a director of chaplaincy services and then you have a chaplain for every world religion...

...I had selected a lot of the poetry and music for the ceremonies that year, yet I am not Catholic, and at the time I was agJohn Fandel nostic at best...

...there is a different vocabulary that gion" with "spiritual," considering the latter term's New speaks to another dimension of human experience...

...In 1996-97 he served as writer in residence at the Haverford School near Philadelphia and at the Woodside Priory School in Portola Valley, "Your son excels in middle-class values...

...and psychology "are incom- David Hicks, now the head plete in the absence of another of the Darlington School in vocabulary that speaks of things like righteousness, for- Rome, Georgia, wonders about the utility of replacing "religiveness, and charity...

...CRIS, the itual development, the study of religion, and community ser- acronym, certainly sounded Christian," Cobb recalls...

...tled "The Strange Fate of the American Boarding School," Unlike his Protestant predecessors, however, Kountz does David V. Hicks, the former rector at Saint Paul's School in not preside at chapel...

...In a 1996 essay in the American Scholar tithe first Roman Catholic to head Shady Side...

...spiritually, it seems to as connoting the doctrinaire, the In response to such changes, dogmatic, the evangelical, the Cobb says, schools replaced tra- me, religion in schools moralistic...

...in memory 1999 Peter Cobb of CSEE says of these Catholic independent schools that "people feel comfortable when folks are reli!Your Easy Essays...

...Hicks acknowledges that in this "aggresdimension may be especially important at schools that, even sively secular" era, "the country has bought into the notion in this meritocratic era, are incubators of privilege...

...The C ber schools, 26 of them Catholic, encourage spir- name was changed to do away with the R word...

...But in Hicks's experience such skitYes and no...

...Indeed, the monks were such an exotic sight that increasingly includes not only Jews and unbelievers but also the school's promotional materials explained that "new stu- Muslims) with a safe passage to Harvard and Yale...

...it opens up, green power Stoner, who went into teaching himself, adds: "I felt a litin the palm: love's flower...

...People saw that unobservant...

...Commonweal 1 8 May 19, 2000 mony, and a coherent set of norms, although it seldom in- the major traditions, and, in the view of one longtime Exvited a confession of faith or inspired a conversion...

...There is no such thing...

...And that both- Concord, New Hampshire, recalled the days when the typers him...

...Tim Oppen- nominator ecumenism" that some school officials see as a heimer, a 1963 graduate of Shady Side Academy, recalls that way to be both religious and inclusive...

...To help Catholic enrollments...

...Consequently, there of different faith traditions and was a "skittishness around the many, many families that are discover themselves word religion...

...In an era in which Ivy League and other elite colleges the teachers are guys in black robes...

...Commonweal 1 9 May 19, 2000 bly...

...We also recognized tional affiliations "their con- that our schools were becoming stituencies and families are com- increasingly secular as well as prised in many cases of people To help students interfaith...

...draw most of their talented students not from prep schools Many of those new students were not Catholic...

...To which more tolerance on the one hand, and denominator conservative restorationists self-esteem on the other...

...I can deal with that...

...But I think part of it did really have an effect on me...

...These days supporters of being coeducational but also in its religious demographics...

...tle strange for receiving an award during my senior year Peter Maurin: May 1877-May 1949 for helping out with the liturgy ceremonies so much...

...Bleary-eyed as they often were, the students ever, the transformation of CRIS to CSEE suggests that not seemed to welcome chapel as more than a glorified assem- many of these schools will seize that opportunity...

...school they have to acknowledge this...

...Cobb notes that these days recognized that the logo looked even at schools with denomina- like a Bible...

...The Benedictines, choose between two missions that in the beginning were whose order founded the school, were vastly mutually compatible but now are at war: preserving their outnumbered on the faculty by lay teachers of all denomi- Christian identity and providing a diverse student body (that nations...

...Michael Mc`ough hady Side Academy is the preeminent private relationship between education and religion...

...In presenting relichapel services were "something of a joke...

...At Phillips Exeter Academy in New He cites an incident during his tenure as head of Saint Hampshire, the schedule of voluntary religious services Mark's School in Dallas...

...Hicks recalls: "Our chairman of the board, a Jew who Society, the Islamic Society, and the Jewish Student Organ- had attended the school in the '60s, thanked them for their ization...

...students discover themselves spiritually, it seems to me, religion in schools must be normative-and "lowest-commonn 1997, during a sabbatical from newspaper denominator ecumenism" isn't much of a norm...

...eter religion teacher, the classroom is key...

...Even with a monthly Mass I didn't feel encouraged to live a Catholic life...

...California...

...Perhaps Spirituality is precisely what distinguishes schools like Sacred the most ecumenically minded Catholic independent schools Heart, Woodside Priory, and a few traditionalist Protestant are the twenty-one members of the Network of Sacred Heart academies from schools where community service is not Schools, and many Jesuit schools also have substantial non- grounded in a religious norm...

...The idea was shelved...

...Not necdents often comment that at first it seems odd that a few of essarily...

...We're really lost without religion," says Kountz...

...in the history of culture from The irony is that many of these schools were founded on the University of Chicago, a Thomas Merton scholar, and the rock of religion...

...Established in 1883 as a Christian school, Court's writ does not run...

...work, I taught at the Woodside Priory School in Does that mean that prestigious private schools must I Portola Valley, California...

...The Catholic schools are not intent on not easy-assays converting non-Catholics to Catholicism...

...giously declarative...

...As I with religion...

...And there is the rub...

...Yet ecumenism" isn't much might ask, paraphrasing Jesus something was missing...

...Mark 8:36), "What cloth it profCobb explains that indepen- a norm...

...At the but from first-rate public schools, one could argue that prep Priory, the student body's week began in the chapel, not schools have been liberated from their perceived obligation with Catholic worship-though Masses were regularly cel- to be inclusive at all costs and are now free to be as "reliebrated there-but with a compulsory nondenominational giously declarative" as Catholic independent schools...

...He has written about religion for the New Republic, Slate.com, the American Spectator, and the New York Times...

...That debate school in Pittsburgh, long viewed by the par- has played out most conspicuously in the tiresome quarrels S ents of Ivy League-aspiring boys as a home- in Congress and the courts about prayer in public schools, town alternative to the famous boarding schools but it resonates even in private schools to which the Supreme of New England...

...Even though that is very important American Scholar essay still exists at some private schools, to the Catholic faith, I think I saw the good in it for different of course...

...Before 1998, CSEE was called lanta-based organization that helps its 400 mem- CRIS-the Council for Religion in Independent Schools...

...But the fact that we don't have a way for our kids to find themselves spiritually, that's very ugly...

...Lewis's phrase) once preached from Protestant prep-school pulpits...

...they are intent on mending the world's wrongs living out their faith tradition...

...Interestingly, many of these are not the Protes- reasons, not attached to spirituality...

...To his dismay, some trustees worried that a chapel program would lead to Christian proselytizing...

...tant academies of old but independent Roman Catholic The restorationists would beg to differ, and so would I. schools with large numbers of non-Catholic pupils...

...We live in a culture of constant pohard to rebut- litical, religious, and moral negotiation and I think it drives a switch of the hickory stick people up the wall...

...it would have been so recognized as late as the 1960s, when Many private (or, as they prefer to be known, indepenthe headmaster presided over chapel services of a palpably dent) schools have abandoned mandatory chapel services, Protestant character...

...But that spiritual smorgasbord is not the only-or sensitivity and said that, for him and for other Jews on the perhaps the most important-contact Exeter students have board, the chapel was an important part of the school...

...available but abundant...

...11 Commonweal 2 0 May 19, 2000...

...a religious dimension in private education are scrambling to Thirty-five percent of the students at the school are Jewish justify the ways of God not to a secularist Supreme Court but and 35 percent Catholic, according to the president of the to the schools' paying customers...

...school build a new chapel, some Episcopalian trustees told Students can commune with Catholic Exonians (about 10 Hicks that they worried that the plan would offend their percent of the student body), the Christian Fellowship, the Jewish friends on the board...