Education: Latin Schools

Headmastering a socialite day school is not always an easy job. Trustees, closer in touch than those of boarding schools, may have too many notions about running things. The parents and children may be more concerned with social life than with scholarship. Day schools are never very lavishly endowed, and when hard times come there is not much slack to be taken up. Last week, very much aware of these things, the headmaster of socialite Chicago Latin School for Boys announced "retirement" at the end of the school year.

Sons of Swifts, Armours, McCormicks, Ishams, Cranes, Strawns, Ryersons, Simpsons have gone to Chicago Latin School. Privately founded and run until 1926, school and building were somewhat suddenly sold out from under the parents of 200 pupils. They organized to keep it going, erected a building on the North Side. For headmaster they got George Norton Northrop, a baldish, well-bred, unprofessorial gentleman, collector of paintings and fine furniture, who had taught at Wisconsin and Minnesota Universities, been headmaster of New York's smart Brearley School for six years. Headmaster Northrop stipulated that eventually there should be annuities and sabbaticals for professors, good salaries, an honest attempt at first-rate scholarships. In 1929, with 260 pupils in the school, much social amiability and financial backing, Headmaster Northrop's contract (at $12,000 a year) was verbally renewed for five years.

Depression was the chief cause for Headmaster Northrop's departure from the Latin School. Mr. Northrop disapproved of the trustees' apparent desire that he be a financial as well as academic headmaster. Last week he pointed out that the school's chief competitor, progressive Francis W. Parker School, has a rich patroness (Mrs. Emmons Elaine, daughter of the late Cyrus Hall McCormick), charges about half the Latin School tuition ($450 up). Headmaster Northrop's salary was cut to $10,000. The annuity plan, by which he had induced several teachers to come to the school, had never been realized. Chicago Latin School has no endowment; its only endowed scholarship is one Headmaster Northrop brought with him in 1926. A fine athletic field was given in 1928 in memory of the late Kersey Coates Reed, but the school would have preferred cash or endowed chairs. Many Chicagoans (like Trustee Lester Armour) have moved to their country homes, put their children in suburban schools. Others have taken their children out of Chicago Latin School, put them in Eastern boarding schools (Headmaster Northrop has a son at Groton, a pretty daughter at Vassar).

While his retirement was making news last week, sneak-thieves entered Headmaster Northrop's North Side apartment, filched $15,000 worth of his wife's jewels.

The term Latin School was once applied to schools in which Latin was the principal subject and all else was taught as growing out of it. Today the curricula in Latin Schools are little different from those in other schools. Chicago's Latin School, founded in 1888, was probably so named because it sounded old and solid. Baltimore has a Boys' Latin School, established in 1844. But the most famed Latin Schools, oldest free schools in the U. S., are those in Boston and nearby Roxbury, founded in 1635 and 1645.*