Education: Molding Men

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They advertise in about a thousand magazines, always showing some hot-shot guy on a horse jumping over a fence . . . And underneath the guy on the horse's picture, it always says: "Since 1888 we have been molding boys into splendid, clear-thinking young men." Strictly for the birds. They don't do any damn more molding at Pencey than at any other school. And I didn't know anybody there that was splendid and clear-thinking and all.

Many an educator seconds Hero Holden Caulfield of The Catcher in the Rye, whose wry view of "Pencey Prep" echoes the language repeatedly used in advertising military academies. For military schools are widely scorned as something akin to reform schools with tuition—handy places for the rich or the divorced to dump incorrigible offspring. "Military schools are a symbol of the abdication of parental responsibility," scoffs one non-military headmaster.

Hock-High in Horses. Happily contradicting this gloomy picture is the better military academy, more academic than military, which is actually a first-rate college preparatory school. Perhaps the best example is Indiana's big (838 boys) Culver Military Academy on the shores of Lake Maxinkuckee. Last week Culver was putting on a $5,000,000 fund-raising campaign for a "Program for Excellence" that will create 70 new scholarships, build a center for alumni and parents, endow faculty salaries with $2,250,000. Even without all this, Culver has more excellence than most civilian schools.

Culver is a 1,400-acre complex of parapets and playing fields that looms out of monotonous farmland like a Hollywood blend of West Point, Dunsinane and Fort Laramie. The school is hock-high in horses—140 of them—plus an indoor polo field, 150 boats, twelve football fields, 15 tennis courts, a bakery and a barbershop, as well as a 44-room hotel and a 64-room motel for visiting parents and girls down for dances. But most of all, Culver has academic status: 99.2% of its graduates have gone to college (and not predominantly to service academies—only 18 have done so in the past four years). Stanford rates Culver among the top five private secondary schools in the U.S.; Yale includes Culver in a list of twelve prep schools that it recommends to inquiring parents.

Knee-Deep in Arts. Opened in 1894, Culver owes its military hue to Founder Henry Harrison Culver, a prosperous St. Louis stovemaker, who for his health roughed it one summer on Lake Maxinkuckee. Culver soon zestfully launched a chautauqua, wound up with a military academy. He aimed to blend liberal and Christian education, using military discipline "because of its peculiar advantage in bringing out the best results in the development of boys."