Chart Your Own Course

The role of a secondary education was scrutinized during Tabor’s earliest days; the school navigated the storm by giving students control of their learning.

The situation facing the Marion School Committee was bleak. “Our schools are indeed in a wretched condition,” the committee lamented in 1860. “On the subject of their improvement, much can be said.”

Marion was not alone. The state of the town’s schools was a microcosm of the challenges facing the nation’s young education system. In 1852, Massachusetts became the first state to pass a compulsory education law. It was a weak law—children between ages eight and 14 were required to spend 12 weeks in school each year—but it was better than nothing. (It wasn’t until 1918 that every state in the union required a minimum level of schooling.) Nevertheless, the officials tasked with overseeing Massachusetts’ schools were frustrated by the chronic absenteeism and lack of public support that stifled progress.

During an 1876 visit to Marion’s town schools, Superintendent John Allen was dismayed to see such low attendance. “In one school that registered twenty-three pupils only three were present,” he reported.

“Elizabeth Taber could not possibly have cast her charity upon waters more uncharted and rock-strewn than the unsettled sea of education in nineteenth century Marion,” wrote Joseph Smart in The School and the Sea, his 1964 account of Tabor history.

Some citizens opposed Tabor’s opening on account of the modest tuition of $8 per term. Others questioned why a secondary school was needed when so few of the country’s youth attended college. In 1870, only about 3% of 17-year-olds graduated from a public or private high school. But Superintendent Allen viewed Tabor as a rising tide.

“That the Academy should be successful is a matter of so much importance to the whole town,” he wrote in 1877, noting how it could attract “pupils from abroad” and provide a much-needed boon to Marion’s post-Civil War economy. Most importantly, Allen did not see Tabor’s presence as detracting from the town schools, which only served lower grade levels. “He saw the new school as the highest step of the educational ladder in Marion, a ladder from which, however, several rungs had long been missing because of public indifference,” Smart wrote.

One of the chief problems Elizabeth Taber and Clark Howland, Tabor’s first principal, had to solve was how to attract students beyond those who were interested in “fitting out” for college. This ties into a larger national debate that was swirling around the role of secondary education. Public high schools had risen in prominence throughout the second half of the nineteenth century, posing a threat to tuition-charging private academies. The latter survived by developing programs designed to help students prepare for college. But if Tabor poured all its energy into becoming a “prep school,” its founder and principal reasoned, it could risk alienating the local families who were essential to its existence. Since the town of Marion did not yet have a public high school, Tabor charted a course that allowed it to fill that void while still courting students with college aspirations.

Throughout Howland’s tenure as principal (1876-1893), Tabor offered specific degree tracks that students could pursue. The most popular choice was the English Course, which was essentially a general education program. The term “English” is deceptively narrow as students who selected this track also studied math, languages, history, civil government, and penmanship, among other subjects. The English Course was designed for students whose formal education would most likely end once they graduated.

Students who hoped to attend college enrolled in the Classical Course. This program featured many of the same classes as the English Course, with the addition of a rigorous Greek and Latin component. Its reading list included Homer, Virgil, and Cicero, along with a healthy dose of Shakespeare. The program was tailored to the college admissions standards of the time. Students who graduated with an average of 80 or higher received “The Principal’s Certificate,” which, according to Smart, “admitted the graduate to Amherst, Boston University, Dartmouth, Harvard, Smith, Wellesley, or Williams.”

Tabor eventually offered a third degree track called the Scientific Course. It was designed for students who had serious interests in the natural sciences but did not wish to devote time to classical subjects. They took classes such as chemistry, physics, geology, plane trigonometry, and botany. Because the program seemed “neither to prepare for college nor to educate generally,” Smart wrote, it was the smallest of the three.

Around the turn of the century, Tabor’s enrollment started to decline. The boarding population was hit particularly hard as more families kept their children home to attend public schools. In 1879, private secondary schools accounted for 73% of the country’s total high school enrollment. By 1900, that figure dropped below 8%. Tabor’s board of trustees, who assumed control of the school following Elizabeth Taber’s death in 1888, warily observed this trend. “The increasing number of free high schools had become by 1900 a veritable torrent of free education which was to wash away more than one academy,” Smart wrote.

Tabor’s second principal, Dana Dustan (1893-1901), pursued a more college prep-heavy curriculum in order to distinguish Tabor from the public high schools. Under his leadership, the Scientific Course was removed and students could choose from two degree tracks, Classical and General. These changes, however, did not yield the desired enrollment gains. In 1901, the trustees voted on “drastic changes in the curriculum and, above all, in the entire direction of the school,” Smart wrote. Nathan Hamblin succeeded Dustan and took the helm with a mandate to steer Tabor closer to the public schools in terms of offering a more flexible curriculum.

To help articulate Tabor’s new academic philosophy, Paul Hanus, a professor of educational theory at Harvard University, was asked to deliver the 1901 commencement address. His talk, titled “A Modern School,” offered a pragmatic and socially conscious vision. “The education demanded by a democratic society today is an education that prepares a youth to overcome the inevitable difficulties that stand in the way of his material and spiritual advancement,” Hanus said. “The only real preparation for life’s duties, opportunities, and privileges is participation in them.”

The modern school, Hanus argued, should give students agency to discover and develop their own interests. “We require of secondary education a flexibility that deliberately cultivates the power of choice,” he said. “Flexibility in secondary education accordingly means that the pupil is free, under certain obvious restrictions, to choose his own studies in accordance with the gradual discovery of his dominant interests and consequent future needs.”

The course catalogs from the years after this speech reveal how Tabor sought to empower students through choice even after the different degree tracks were eliminated. “The school’s course of study was to be based not on what this or that college demanded of its applicants, but on what life itself demanded of everyone,” Smart wrote. A greater variety of electives and vocational courses were offered in subjects such as bookkeeping, commercial arithmetic, sewing, agriculture, and typewriting.

In the fall of 1907, a stock market crash triggered a wave of financial panic that undermined Tabor’s progress. “The enrollment at the academy,” Smart wrote, “reflected the state of the national economy with rather remarkable speed.” By 1911, only nine out-of-town students joined 35 Marion residents to make up the student body. By 1915, the fiscal picture was so grim that the trustees agreed to transfer control of Tabor to the town to serve as a public high school. This prospect was so upsetting to three of the trustees that their fellow board members gave them latitude to search for a leader who might be able to right the ship.

At the eleventh hour, Walter Lillard came aboard. As Tabor’s fifth headmaster, Lillard oversaw a complete reorganization of the school. The sea became the beating heart of Tabor’s identity, and students were encouraged to pursue their individual interests in a setting that prioritized real-world experience. Specialized curricula developed over time, creating the rich offerings that empower today’s students to customize their Tabor experience. For a closer look at the birth of the nautical science department, read our article “Anchored in Tradition.”