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67 CHAPTER FOUR Finding Solace in the Natural World: Prep-School Years in New Jersey, Maine, and South Florida, 1956-1961 T he seventy-mile car ride from Forest Hills to Lawrenceville was a study in contrasts. It began in a suburban world, with parks, trees, and bushes, moved westward across the heart of Manhattan, where nature had been all but erased from view, southward into New Jersey along the western edge of the New York metropolitan area and through one of the ugliest, smelliest industrial zones of the United States, and finally out into the bucolic, often beautiful, farmlands around Princeton and Lawrenceville. I had taken the trip a number of times before, when my parents were visiting one or both of my brothers, or bringing them home for vacation, but this ride was, of course, very different from previous ones. Now it would be my turn to endure the harsh realities of the boarding school experience. Founded in 1810, Lawrenceville is one of the oldest of the American private academies that correspond to the so-called “public schools” of England like Eton and Harrow. In terms of social prestige and presumed academic excellence, Lawrenceville has often been grouped together with two other elite college-preparatory schools, Andover, founded in Massachusetts in 1778, and Exeter, founded in New Hampshire in 1783. By the beginning of the 1950s, the leaders of all three institutions came to believe that because of the rigorous demands placed on their students to succeed in what were often college-level studies, graduates of their Escaping into Nature 68 academies were finding the first year or two of college to be a boring repetition of what they had already learned. As a result, educators from the “big three” prep schools joined together with the “big three” at the top of the Ivy League college hierarchy, Harvard, Princeton, and Yale, and formed a committee to study the problem. In 1952, this group published a report that would lead to the establishment, in 1955, of the Advanced Placement Program for highschool students. Originally, the purpose of AP courses was to have seniors engage in college-level work, like that already being done at the private academies, to be followed by achievement examinations. Those who scored well on the tests would then be given advanced standing in these subjects after they entered college. Many millions have taken these exams, but over the years, they have become less of an opportunity for advanced standing once a student enters college and more of a tool for being admitted to college in the first place. Thus, they have become another example of how students from wealthy secondary schools, with many AP classes, have a distinct advantage over those from poorer institutions with few, if any, of these courses. Lawrenceville’s key role in the creation of the Advanced Placement Program just as I was matriculating there in September 1956 indicates the intensity of the academic pressure I was about to experience on a daily basis. I soon discovered that if I fell behind by even one class assignment, especially in subjects like math and science, there was little chance of catching up. Compounding my unhappiness over this unrelenting pressure to perform well academically for my “masters” (the British term for teachers used at Lawrenceville), without any encouragement whatsoever from my absent mother and father, was the Spartan, spiritually draining physical environment in which I was forced to live and the culture of aggression that permeated the place. When Mother and I arrived on campus, I learned that I had been assigned to Perry Ross, one of four “houses” in a huge, brick, two-story building called Lower School. Each house was a barrack-like dormitory with about fifteen cubicles, with thin wooden partitions between them, on either side of a wide hallway. As I recall, my compartment had a shallow built-in closet that extended out from one side, and barely enough room for a small bed, a radiator, a bureau with a little lamp on top, and a hard, straight-back chair. Because the sides of the cubicles didn’t go all the way to the ceiling, any boy could hear other boys talking several cubicles away. This structural feature, as well as the fact that there was no door at the entrance of the compartments, meant that there was little privacy possible in my new habitat. That first day, as I stood in the hallway looking in at [18.219...

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