Education: New Pater

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Like lay brothers in a religious house, Kent Schoolboys do most of the work around their establishment themselves. They make beds, wait tables, do kitchen duty, scrub floors. Another part of the Kent pattern since its founding in a Connecticut farmhouse 43 years ago by Father Frederick H. Sill: a headmaster drawn from the Episcopal (and monastic) Order of the Holy Cross.

Last week, prosperous Kent School, with 300 students, 26 teachers, and $2,000,000 worth of modern colonial buildings sprawled along Connecticut's meandering Housatonic River, made an administrative departure. It hired a new headmaster who has a wife and four growing kids.

Unlike Founder Sill and retiring Headmaster Father William Scott Chalmers (who was California-bound to take over North Hollywood's Harvard School), lean, 41-year-old John Oliver Patterson has never been a monastic. Born in Goldfield, Nev., he was originally trained as an architect at the University of Illinois and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. After two years as a practising architect the new "pater" left his drawing board for the ministry, now has 15 bustling years in Midwestern parishes behind him. In the last eight years he has swelled his Madison, Wis. congregation from 600 to 1,500, housed the overflow in a streamlined Quonset-type chapel which he helped to design. When Kent trustees began looking for a "live-wire with a soul" to head Kent last spring, they lit on John Patterson as their man, persuaded him to exchange his varied duties as parish rector for the narrower duties of head of a tight academic community; give up fishing in the cool lakes of Wisconsin for the streams of Connecticut.

When Father Patterson takes over this fall, Kent anticipates few changes in its way of life. The new head has pledged himself to carry on Founder Sill's original program and continue to make "every aspect of life on the campus express and induce Christian principles and Christian living."