St. Mark's School (Massachusetts)

St Mark's School
St Mark's School
Standort
	Southborough, Massachusetts,; USA
Information
Typ	Private High School, boarding
Motto	Age Quod Agis (Do What You Do)
Established	1865
Number of students	325 (2004–05)
Campus	Suburban
Color(s)	Blue and White
Mascot	Winged Lion
Newspaper	The St. Marker
Website	[1]

St. Mark’s School is a coeducational, Episcopal, preparatory school, situated on 250 acres (1.0 km²) in Southborough, Massachusetts, 25 miles (40 km) from Boston. It was founded in 1865 as an all-boys' school by Joseph Burnett, a wealthy native of Southborough who developed and marketed the world-famous Burnett Vanilla Extract[2]. Girls have attended since the nineteen-seventies. St. Mark's is a member of the Independent School League, and the second-oldest of the five elite prep schools collectively termed St. Grottlesex.

The school's 65 teachers lead 350 boarding and day students through a rigorous curriculum and a full program of co-curricular activities. Class size averages 10, with a student-faculty ratio of 5:1. Each department offers honors and advanced placement sections (numbering 24 in total, more than any other school in the Independent School League).

John Warren ’74, is currently headmaster.

History

Joseph Burnett, a wealthy resident of Southborough, founded St. Mark's in 1865, after Henry Coit of St. Paul's School of Concord, New Hampshire, told him that with six sons to educate, he would do well to found his own school, instead of sending them to St. Paul's. Episcopalian St. Mark's is one of the earlier New England schools founded on the British model, as opposed to New England academies such as Phillips Andover Academy and Phillips Exeter Academy, both with roots nearly a century earlier. St. Mark's initial board of trustees was composed of members of many prominent Boston families, as well as many eminent Episcopal churchmen, and from the beginning the school attracted many members of Boston Brahmin and New York Knickerbocker families.

From the start, St. Mark's developed a reputation for rigorous academics and social exclusivity, a reputation that persists to this day, although the school has made enormous efforts to expand its diversity since World War II, and particularly since the 1960s.

Girls were first admitted in the 1970s.

Academics

Though the means by which faculty may educate students has changed with advances in technology, St. Mark’s still looks to its Latin motto as an inspiration for that mission. "Age Quod Agis" literally translates to "Do What You Do." A more contemporary translation might be: "Whatever you choose to do, do it well."

The scale on which this mission is carried out is considerably more expansive now than it was in the school’s first academic year. Initially, the school employed one faculty member and educated a dozen boys. The school now employs more than 60 faculty members and welcomes more than 330 students each fall. Students, boys and girls, come not only from New England but from around the world. In the 1970s, St. Mark’s reached an agreement for coordinated education with the nearby Southborough School, a newly founded institution for girls and in 1977 The Southborough School merged with St. Mark’s.

St. Mark’s remains focused on academics, providing a rigorous liberal arts program stemming from a classical tradition, and prepares its students entry to competitive colleges and universities. It is characterized by small classes, close student-teacher relationships, and a strong emphasis on the sporting life as a complement to the life of the mind.

Curriculum

The St. Mark's curriculum follows a liberal arts tradition. An English course required every year of students. All students take the same English class their first three years, and choose from a selection of electives their final year. Mathematics is required up and until the level of Algebra II. Two years of laboratory science is required and one year of art and religion. In addition, one year of American history is required. Students take between 5 and 6 classes each year depending on the difficulty of the classes and their personal ambition.

Programs

St. Mark's offers several unique programs to its students and others affiliated with the school. The programs are as follow:

The Math Insititute
The Summer Music Institute
Electric Vehicle Engineering
Visiting Poet Program

Facilities

St. Mark’s has changed much in appearance since its founding. Headmaster Thayer initiated a major building program that dramatically enhanced the school. In Burnett's time the school in its entirety was made up of one structure—a square, two-story house painted yellow with green blinds. That building and others from those early days, including a large schoolroom and dormitory wing built in 1866–1867, were gradually demolished during the Thayer period in the 1890s, to make way for the brick and Tudor-styled structures that now comprise the school’s 250-acre (1.0 km²) campus. Notable in the Thayer vision was the cloister-style construction of the school, with interconnected buildings forming an architectural ensemble in which the entire school, alone among elite American boarding schools, was essentially under one roof, in many cases with dorms on the upper floors of the buildings and classrooms and other academic halls in the lower floors. The school as it appeared in the early 1950s is portrayed under the name "St. Bart's" in the novel Pnin by Vladimir Nabokov, whose son Dmitri attended the school.

This coherent architectural vision has survived to this day, and St. Mark's main campus structure has remained remarkably well-preserved. The school itself touts the "school under one roof" concept as a unique strength. It is certainly unusual. With the exception of St. Paul's School, the other St. Grottlesex schools and schools in the Independent School League built their campuses in architectural styles that mimicked the architectural vernacular and English colonial references of the Harvard University campus and the early New England academies.

St. Mark's late twentieth and early twenty-first century construction of an athletic center, a dormitory and a large performing arts center have led to some of the campus structures no longer being under a single roof. How this close, cohesive architectural environment impacts student relations has not been formally studied. Sadly, during the construction of the performing arts center, another beloved facility--the fives courts mentioned by Nabokov--were razed. This effectively ceded to Groton School, the only other school in the independent school league with fives courts, the permanent title of North American Fives Champions.

School profile

School Endowment: $140 million

Notable and famous alumni

File:Rlowell.jpg

Poet Robert Lowell

St. Mark's School has had numerous illustrious alumni and been well represented in the arts and letters. Poet Robert Lowell wrote for the school literary magazine while a student, as poet Harry Crosby did earlier. Artist William Congdon began painting there. Henry Demarest Lloyd, a notable nineteenth century progressive and the father of investigative journalism, studied at St. Mark's. Journalism has historically been particularly well represented at the school, with a number of Pulitzer Prize-winning journalists having begun their writing careers there. Former CBS news chief and the Nation editor Blair Clark, Washington Post editor Benjamin Bradlee, and most recently Motley Fool financial publisher David Gardner are alumni. The Forbes family of the Forbes Magazine publishing empire includes a number of St. Markers. The Pulitzer publishing family also counted generations of St. Mark's graduates, including Joseph Pulitzer III, who credited St. Mark's with awakening his appreciation of the arts. St. Markers have become senior Episcopal clergy and parish priests. The school has produced senators, representatives, governors, and senior diplomats, and of course St. Markers are heavily represented in academia, education, finance, the law, and business. Story Musgrave is a St. Marker who is now a retired astronaut. In recent years, a number of critics, actors, and artists who attended St. Mark's are now building their own legacies of achievement.

Notable faculty

W. H. Auden, poet
Kate Benson, novelist.
Richard Eberhart, poet (1933 to 1941)
Peter Glomset, Rhodes Scholar and Fulbright Scholar (2000 to Present)
Laurie Lorant, a Melville scholar and author.
Stephen Lynch, Andre Gide scholar and author.
Robert Metcalfe, trustee and inventor of Ethernet
William E. Peck, Founder of the Pomfret School in Pomfret, Connecticut
James Tanton, renowned mathematic educator and popularizer; founder of the Math Institute. (2003 to Present)
John Rowe Workman, distinguished classicist and later chair of Brown University Classics Department

Trivia

Baseball's catcher's mask was first used in 1875 by a St. Marks School catcher. It was originally a fencing helmet he modified so as to protect his broken nose. A Harvard baseball player by the name of Fred Thayer was playing on the opposing team that day and by 1878 Thayer had gotten a patent on it.
St. Mark's was originally a feeder school to Harvard.
Poet Robert Lowell, generally considered to be one of the greatest American poets of the twentieth century, wrote his earliest published prose for student journals while at St. Mark's.
Fay School was initially founded to be a feeder school to St. Mark's.
William E. Peck founded the Pomfret School in Pomfret, Connecticut in 1894 after serving as head of St. Mark's.
Discussed in The Official Preppy Handbook by Lisa Birnbach.
School Ties (1992), starring Brendan Fraser, Chris O'Donnell, Matt Damon, and Ben Affleck, was filmed at Middlesex and St. Mark's. Originally, the director wanted to use St. Mark's picturesque Tudor buildings as the primary film site; however, he was unable to get a permit from the local police station that would allow him to close off the street for filming. Thus he decided to use Middlesex School.
St. Mark's was referred to in the Gilmore Girls episode titled "You've Been Gilmored". In it, one of the characters is mentioned to have been kicked out of Groton, St. Mark's, and Rivers.
The school is mentioned in F. Scott Fitzgerald's classic first novel, This Side of Paradise.
St. Mark's high school football rivalry since 1886 with the younger Groton School is one of the oldest athletic rivalries in the United States, following the Andover-Exeter rivalry. List of high school football rivalries

References

External links