Dartmouth's Worst Feeder School

By Benjamin Wallace-Wells | Wednesday, April 16, 1997

Imagine a high school devoid of nearly all traditional high school features — popular football games, pep rallies, school dances.

Imagine a school where the prima donnas of the Parents Association routinely call teachers to grill them over their child's most recent sub-par quiz grade.

Imagine a school that dismisses its students early on Fridays so that they can be ferried out to family beach houses on Spring weekends.

Imagine all of this set in the Bronx and you have The Horace Mann School, a place where the ugly paradox of country club and competitive academic slaughterhouse is neatly resolved in a cushy private school that serves as a last outpost of wealthy New York snobbishness, a pompous enclave in the gritty Bronx.

Described as a 'rustic fantasia of academic ferocity,' The Horace Mann School ('The' conspicuously included) is undoubtedly fierce.

In the absence of traditional activities like athletics (few play, none watch), intelligence and academic achievement become the measuring sticks of success. Students at The Horace Mann School (and their parents) go to considerable lengths to prove their worth by the most obvious means available to them: grades. Examples abound.

One female graduate in the class of 1996, now at Penn, had been tutored three days a week for the SAT tests since she was in eighth grade.

A male campus leader, currently at Harvard, was sent to classes at Yale University to learn Latin since the tender age of 7; he had been tutored since he was 5.

A friend of mine, who permanently moved to his family's beach-front villa in Southern France before the start of high school, had a tutor in every single subject — each of whom he met twice a week— in the sixth grade.

The School estimates that each student spends slightly over four hours each night on homework.

An eighth grader had his telephone conversations taped, was not allowed out of his house, and his parents made harassing phone calls to his friends. The problem? He had done poorly on a French exam. In eighth grade.

Such excesses are the norm, not the exception. This sort of obsessive drive for academic accomplishment usually characterizes public magnet schools whose economically impoverished student body only has one avenue to improve their economic lot. Not so at The Horace Mann School.

The Horace Mann School is a citadel of Gucci.

The student parking lot is lined with sporty BMWs, classy Lexii, rugged Jeep Grand Cherokee's, and little else. Such is the social conformity at the school that nearly all the Lexii and BMW's are black, and nearly all the Grand Cherokees are hunter green.

Last year, a school photographer managed to capture the quintessential The Horace Mann School image: one side of the street lined with six or seven hunter green grand Cherokees in a row, the other side with a like number of Black Lexii. Needless to say, individuality is not the most valued of social commodities.

The Horace Mann School cafeteria boasts no lunch monitors or blasting stereos. There is, however, an Evian machine, dispensing miniature bottles of Euro-purity.

The de facto uniform for women is black; black pants, tight black shirts, black platform shoes, black shoulder bags. Men wear khakis and either solid blue work shirts or blue and white striped ordeals. Jackets and ties are not uncommon. Navy on women is questionable, denim a disgrace.

Parties are ceremonies of passage (The Horace Mann School is a big fan of ostentatious Bar Mitzvahs) and are not thrown at individual homes. Instead, they are thrown at palaces of New York wealth like the Plaza Hotel or the Pierre.

Hordes of dancers, musicians, and caterers swarm about, hired to help celebrate the induction of yet another Joshua or Ashley into the New York aristocracy of wealth.

Such decadence is institutionalized; both high school and elementary schools dismiss their students early on Fridays so that families can head out for weekends at the beach house in time to catch that precious late afternoon sun.

Students at The Horace Mann School are not the uptight shut-ins that their study habits would indicate. Most students frequent a small circle of bars on the exclusive Upper East and Upper West Sides of New York to practice hobnobbing and drinking margaritas in anticipation of their middle-aged country club days.

Never a group to miss out on wild parties, teenagers from The Horace Mann School also go clubbing on occasion. They are the ones clad in black, packed tightly in a nervous group, dancing extremely conservatively, and peeping out fearfully at the wild rage surrounding them.

Last spring, New York magazine ran an article on the Horace Mann phenomenon, and seemed utterly amazed by it; there was no attempt to explain what was apparently deemed the inexplicable. In fact, there is a fairly simple explanation.

The parents of students at The Horace Mann School are not the ancient Yankee boarding school elites that normally produce such decadence. They are, for the most part, successful families who started out poor and have worked their way up through talent and intelligence. Now in mid-life, they find themselves forced by their success in competition with blue-blazered and blue-blooded Ivy League Yankees. Because their family lineage does not offer them the sort of prestige it affords these ancient WASPS, parents of The Horace Mann School seek status through the success of their children. Thus the twin drives of academic success — to put them in the same colleges as the children of the WASPs, and to give their children the feelings of wealth and power, the same life experiences as the ancient elites. The Horace Mann School is a study in the formation of a new elite.

The formula works, and so the well-fed, well-clad, well-educated young drivers of Lexii force themselves into the American power scene; over 45% attend Ivy League Colleges. They descend on these schools, spreading the obnoxious, ostentatious, provincial New York snobbery their education has taught them well.

America, beware. Your future leaders wear Gucci.

Dartmouth's Worst Feeder School

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