Word: dalton
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Editor Norman Podhoretz, Actor Eli Wallach, Critic Alfred Kazin, Cartoonist Jules Feiffer, and a covey of New York's richest lawyers and brokers have in common? For one thing, they all spend as much as $3,000 a year to send their children to Manhattan's private Dalton School. For another, they have lately turned their intellectual ferocity to intramural school brawling...
...issue is the future of a school as famous as its parents: Dalton is the most progressive of the city's chic schools and the most chic of the city's progressive schools. Since it opened in 1919, Dalton has let children set their own pace through a curriculum rich in art and music. In the post-Sputnik 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...
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...
Such notions, though, did Barr no good in the new era of the Woodstock Nation and its admiring Dalton parents. As one Dalton mother said of her nine-year-old, "he's not our son; he's our friend." Barr was so out of it that he even tried to ban blue jeans and long hair on boys. While teaching a course on Marxism, he actually started wearing an American-flag pin on his lapel. When Barr began referring to staying after school as "detention," one father growled, "Will the children be allowed one phone call to their...