Here are a few choice exerpts from the 1976 TIME article featuring Hyde Schools’ founder Joe "Joey" Gauld.
- Many of the students are troubled, and short-tempered Gauld treats them like a drill instructor faced with a platoon of left-footed recruits. He occasionally slaps and routinely humiliates the kids—with their parents' tacit consent—in a no-holds-barred effort to toughen them up and build their characters.
- "The rod is only wrong in the wrong hands," Gauld likes to say.
- [Gauld] has even conducted a public paddling ceremony at Hyde.
- Parents are required to make a strong commitment to Hyde's philosophy. They participate in two encounter weekend seminars annually, at which everyone criticizes everyone else.
- "Everyone wants to run away from here sometime." In fact, each year about 50 students do run away—and 20 never return. Gauld blames the dropout rate on the parents' failure to uphold their pledge to make runaways return to Hyde.
- “You find that the kids are in effect brainwashed." Doris Vladimiroff, director of HEW'S Upward Bound program in Maine, whose son went to a Hyde summer session, complains: "Gauld's techniques are nothing less than demoniacal."
- Novel and untested, Hyde could not hope to attract outstanding students; thus Gauld started by accepting teen-agers with a history of mental illness or drug problems... Despite the large number of problem children, there are no psychologists on the school's staff, because Hyde teachers prefer to "use our gut feelings."
Full TIME article:
http://content.time.com/time/subscriber/article/0,33009,914495,00.html-----------
And don't forget the wonderful New York Times article:
At the Hyde School, the idea is to break through these restraints on “unique potential,” and this can take forms ranging from attendance at regular
self‐criticism “seminars” to an occasional
public paddling of obstreperous boys or, in the case of one girl,
a dunking in the duck pond.
Mr. Gauld is so insistent that a young person's character is more important than his grades that The Hyde School's graduation honors are ranked according to the graduate's development as a person, rather than on his or her grade.
Mr. Gauld is not surprised by the fact that many of the students who come there are either from troubled families, have washed out of other schools or are what he calls “classic underachievers'—students who are bright but don't seem to get anything out of school.
“Nobody's going to give me their top kids,” he said, “so I go to people and say, ‘Give me the kid who bothers you.'"
New York Times article:
https://www.nytimes.com/1974/03/20/archives/new-prep-school-view-kids-character-comes-first-y-iver-peterson.html-------------
In the Herald News, 1974:
https://www.newspapers.com/clip/76377987/duck-pond-paddle/Gauld insists that although some of his disciplinary methods are unorthodox, they work. On one occasion, when a boy refused to abide by study-hall rules, Gauld ordered him to make a paddle out of wood and then gave him four swats with it in front of the entire student body. Another time, a girl was tossed into the duck pond when she spoke disrespectfully.
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If this is what the Hyde founder called "character building", and bragged about in public national news articles, then what on earth was he also doing and teaching faculty (and all his family members and relatives who run the school) to do behind closed doors?
