Word: putney
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When Mrs. Carmelita Hinton founded the Putney School in 1935, she was attempting to utilize in education some of John Dewey's ideas, particularly those concerning the interaction of community and individual life. Putney has always been conscious of itself as a community and has striven to be an ideal community. The values of the individual are instilled, not by personal coercion, but by the example of the community. The values, it is hoped, will last after the individual has left Putney, so that he can be in a position to improve the quality of his new environment...
...Hinton had no new philosophy of life which she hoped to indoctrinate into the students. Putney was to be a college preparatory school which was "progressive" only insofar as it was willing to experiment, to try out new techniques and methods of education. Some of these represented a radical departure from the traditional New England Academies, particularly the novelty of co-education in a boarding school (which had actually existed for some time in the Friends' schools the school were those for which "civilized men" had worked "for centuries...
...certain amount of selectivity is implicit in these aims. Mrs. Hinton had a definite conception of the "good life", and believed firmly that the best way to prepare for it was to live it. The life at Putney is influenced most strongly by her vision of the good life: one close to nature, which benefited from the cultural achievements of mankind, but which escaped, almost categorically, from the materialistic side of modern civilization. The setting of Putney, in southern Vermont, and the dominating personal force which Mrs. Hinton exerted over the school in her twenty years as its director transferred...
...curriculum at Putney, then, goes far beyond the usual academic and athletic program of secondary school. Putney seeks to bring out all of the best qualities of the student, and endeavors to supply as complete an educational experience as possible without regimenting every minute into planned activity...
...Putney all the way to the heart of London where no Oxford or Cambridge crew had been before...