Word: barre
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...1960s, though, Dalton's board joined the national clamor for more academic rigor and became ever more eager for a school that could push children into high-prestige colleges. To tighten up, the board of trustees picked a stubborn new headmaster in 1964. As it turns out, Donald Barr may now be too stubborn to survive...
Free-Choice Shtik. A former assistant dean at Columbia University's engineering school, Barr arrived at Dalton with a dim view of "orthodox" progressive education's emphasis on emotional development. Bumptious and bright, by turns pompous and ingenuous, Barr implemented the trustees' decisions to make Dalton's all-girl high school coed and to more than double the size of the school, to 1,000. The expansion permitted seven kinds of science, ten languages, 20 English courses. "My shtik" Barr said, "is freedom of choice for the students whenever possible...
...Though Barr was nominally opposed to "the crude lash of competition," he sent his own four sons to the fiercely competitive Horace Mann School, and chipped away at Dalton's progressivism by installing tests to supplement written evaluations of students. In an opinionated article several years ago, he flayed teen-age sex ("robots in heat") and roasted permissive parents. "The trouble with many children," he declared, "is that their fathers are mothers and their mothers are sisters...
...Barr is sincerely concerned that today's students are so distracted by political activism and youth cultism that academic work is being slighted. His remedy is more adult models ("happy, controlled, competent people"). "What students need," he once wrote, "is something to rebel against that is worthy of their respect-even of healthy and manageable fear...
...Chicago, the legendary Stringfellow Barr devised the Great Books program, and St. John's College, in Annapolis, Md., reverted to a program of readings in the classics substantially similar to the school's original eighteenth century curriculum...