NMH Magazine : Winter 2008

The Gift of an Odd Education

My family has had a love/hate relationship with education. My father, Stanley Rowland, planned on becoming a doctor. I have a photo of him leaving by train for Brown University in 1912—dark suit, modest tie, traveling gloves. But after graduating in 1916, he joined the American Expeditionary Force instead of starting medical school, and, by the next June, found himself among the first 14,000 AEF members to land in France.

His work as a frontline medic during some of the worst trench warfare persuaded him to abandon medicine in favor of his second love, painting. He spent several years after the war tramping around the Pyrenees, working in various ateliers in Paris, and finding his way as a young artist. When he eventually returned to the United States, his educational path took him not to med school but to the Rhode Island School of Design. He was a freelance artist the rest of his life.

My mother, Harriet Rowland, born into a moderately stuffy Main Line Philadelphia family in 1900, was summarily booted out of Hannah More Academy, a respectable girls’ school, in 1917 for participating in a protest for women’s suffrage. As soon as World War I was over, Mom moved to Paris where she attended the Sorbonne, wrote poetry, and eventually earned a degree in literature. There is a family photo taken of her at a Paris café in the early 1920s. She is sitting with the poet Kahlil Gibran, both of them smoking small, curved meerschaum pipes. I assume this was a 1920s French version of spring break.

Mom’s brother and my uncle, Robeson Bailey, was another educational iconoclast. He taught English at Harvard, Smith, Penn, and Reed College, as well as at Bread Loaf, yet never earned anything beyond a bachelor’s degree. I recall a photo of Uncle Bob that showed him and Robert Frost seated at the bar at the then-Williams House in Williamsburg, Massachusetts, glaring at the camera like a pair of boiled owls.

Back in the States in the late 1920s, my parents met, married, and started a family. Unhappy with the educational options in southwestern Connecticut, Mom started her own school, eventually named the Long Ridge School, on our back porch in 1937. This past weekend I attended a celebration of Long Ridge School’s 70th anniversary, which, curiously enough, involved dedicating a new arts building. I found myself thinking about the wide range of students who had attended my mother’s school over the years, from Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward’s daughters to Meatloaf’s son to the piano prodigy who spent most of second grade convinced he was a cocker spaniel.

I also thought about my own odd educational journey: a high school dropout who learned skills like how to load a five-inch naval gun, how to drive an 18-wheeler, and how to manufacture plastic Christmas trees, long before returning to school to earn undergraduate and graduate degrees.

And I thought about NMH and what has kept me here for the last 29 of my 42 years as a teacher. Like my mother’s school, Northfield Mount Hermon really is a remarkable place. Unlike many of our peer schools, NMH has always seemed to me to respect and make room for the odd, the quirky—the individual. We encourage our students to decide for themselves who and what they want to be—and then help them to be the very best at it that they can. It is this quality of individual acceptance and support that I love most about our school. It is this quality of nourishing the individual that excuses all the hassles about schedules, meetings, and the other inevitable effluvia of academic life. It is this quality that I hope and trust NMH will never lose. And we won’t—so long as we remember that respect for individuality must extend to an appreciation of our own unique identity and value as a school.

Let us be appreciative.

David Rowland is director of the NMH Theater Department.

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