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But what’s most on my mind these days is what’s going on in the present time. My kids are at a milestone – they just started high school three days ago. They are attending big, giant American public high schools, very different from my overseas international school. Both Langley High School, which Greg and Lizzy are attending, and TJ (Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology), which Laura is going to, have 2,000 students, with 500 in each grade, as opposed to the 65 or so in my graduating class.
So this started me thinking about the schooling of their relatives and ancestors. As for me, I attended public schools through the 7th grade, after which we moved to Hong Kong, and I went to the American school there, Hong Kong International School, until I graduated from high school. My mother and aunt were educated in their local public school, while my dad, a “Navy brat”, mostly attended public school – he and one of my uncles graduated from Western High School, in Washington, D.C. – but during part of his growing-up years, he also attended a boarding school in Switzerland, very unusual, particularly in the late 1920s. And that was because my grandmother thought to take advantage of my grandfather’s tour of sea duty to send her sons somewhere where they could learn French and immerse themselves in another culture, rather than to stay at a Navy base stateside.
Moving back a generation, my mother’s mother, whom we kids called “Gomma”, went to some sort of finishing school for high school, it might have been a boarding school. She was not a particularly diligent student, and one of our family stories was how Gomma wrote to her father and asked if she could please drop her Algebra class and take Fancy Dancing instead. In contrast to what the answer would be these days, my great-grandfather answered, “Why, of course, Darling.” After all, his thinking was that “fancy dancing” would be much more useful to her as a young woman than algebra.
The situation with my other grandmother was quite different. She was a good student and really wanted to go to college, but her father wouldn’t send her. Whether that was because the family was not as well-off as it had been and the education budget was saved for the sons of the family, or it was because there had been a falling-out between my grandmother and her father over the latter’s affair and later divorce of my grandmother’s mother, or for some other reason, I’m not sure. But higher education of girls was certainly not a priority for either of my great-grandfathers. Perhaps in reaction to this sentiment, my grandmother devoted a lot of energy to promoting education for her children and grandchildren, including coming up with the creative idea of sending her four sons to school in Switzerland for two years. And she was just thrilled when I went to graduate school.
My two grandfathers, by contrast, not only went to college, but it was encouraged and assumed by their parents that they would go to university, and their families ensured their preparation for higher education. My mother’s father, “Gonkey”, grew up in Greencastle, Pennsylvania and attended its public schools – this was in the first decade of the 1900s. After high school, he prepared for the engineering school at Yale University, which his uncle, Henry Fletcher, very generously paid for, by spending a year at Penn State.
My dad’s father, “Gramp”, grew up in Wilmington, North Carolina, and the public schools were not as well-developed in the South as in the North, plus he was more than a decade older than Gonkey. In various notes he wrote later, Gramp says that in his early years (the late 1880s and the 1890s), he attended private schools in Wilmington. Then in 1898, at the age of 14, he was sent to the Horner Military School, which he described as a “tin solider school”, in Oxford, North Carolina, 175 miles away from home. A number of his ancestors, brothers, and cousins attended the University of North Carolina, but he was the fifth son, and the family didn’t have the money it had had before the Civil War, so his father suggested he go to the Naval Academy – and perhaps he saw in his number five son a certain combativeness that would suit military life! Another motivation of my great-grandfather, a Confederate army veteran, in sending one of his sons to the Naval Academy, was probably his great interest in Naval history, an interest that even extended to publishing a study he did on what John Paul Jones’s real last name was (a question that fascinated scholars at the time, for some reason). As Gramp rather eloquently later described it:
I was born and raised in the finest of rebel traditions so I never had any idea of selling my soul for Uncle Sam’s gold. In fact I knew nothing whatever of the Navy at that time…. While on Xmas leave in 1900 my father asked me if I would like to go to the Naval Academy. As I had never given the matter a thought I had no ideas whatever on the subject, but I saw that he really desired my going and being a dutiful son I said yes I would like nothing better. Thus is our destiny shaped.
I have found one mention of public school attendance among my earlier ancestors. The maternal great-grandparents of my grandmother – the one who really wanted to go to college but could not – moved to Brooklyn from Maine and Massachusetts and became very successful, I think even wealthy, ship builders and shipping agents. In the obituary of my grandmother’s grandfather, Henry Edwin Nesmith, born in Brooklyn in 1828, the only thing it reports about his education was that he attended “public school No. 1”. This attendance would have been in the 1830s and 1840s. I learned from the Brooklyn Library that this school was located at the corner of Adams Street and Concord, in Brooklyn Heights. It was finally torn down in the 1930s when the extension of the Brooklyn Bridge was built. I like the fact that my great-great-grandfather’s childhood public grammar school was important enough to him that it gets featured in his obituary many decades later.