Continued:
Because Hyde was a new, untried school, Gauld couldn't attract the best students who wanted to go to prestige prep schools in order to get into prestige colleges. So, he asked high school counselors to give him their difficult students. This led to Hyde's being labeled a place for rich kids in trouble.
"The tough ones were really the best to test your concepts," he said. "And they were hard-nosed. Most of the first student body numbering 57 came from troubled families, had flunked out of other schools, had been in scrapes with the law, had spent time in psychiatric hospitals or had just never tried to get anything out of school." While a number of the Hyde students still are problem children, the type of students enrolled has broadened considerably since the beginning.
From the beginning, admission to Hyde was based on the student's sincerity and desire rather than on academic achievement.
"If you bet on character development, you're betting on an attribute and effort rather than on a specific ability," says Gauld. "An individual must like him or herself and laugh at shortcomings. No one should be hung up on whether they are succeeding or falling. They may be failing because they've tackled too big a task."
At Hyde, past school records are never consulted unless the child or parents make a special request. Enrollment is approved or turned down after a grueling interview with the potential student, parents and a teacher.
Getting through the interview, however, can be too much for some students' mettle. Gauld told about one interview in a Sunday Telegram column:
"Sally was sent to me for an interview as sort of a last resort. The Hyde approach seems generally successful, so we were often thought of in difficult cases, and Silly's was a beaut. She had taken complete command of her house and on the side had done in several psychiatrists.
"The Hyde interview is an in-depth session that requires both the students and their parents to take a deep look at themselves and their attitudes. Sally quickly showed she wanted none of that. The teacher had to drag Sally and her parents into my office.
"After several questions, she made the same clear to me. And when I tried to turn my attention to Sally's mother to tell her what she ought to do about that, Sally made it dear she didn't want that either.
"Sally, your remarks insult me, your parents and teenagers. I have a high regard for 16-year-olds, and you are going to act like one in my presence. I don't let little brats like you insult them with your six-year-old behavior in my presence.
"Listen, Sally, I'm not your parents, and I'm telling you either change your attitude around me, or I will jam it down your throat!'
"She left in a huff, slamming things around, while startled visitors looked on. But she was shocked when she found me right behind her.
"The next hour would have done justice to the Keystone Cops. I would get her apology, but she was so used to winning, she couldn't resist getting in the last word.
"During this battle, we had crawled in and out of her family's car twice (I got in before she could lock it). I slapped her three times in response to her screaming at me and chased her once around the grounds when she tried to get away from me.
"We ended up at the Duck Pond, and in her raging frustration, she let go with a well-turned obscenity."
With that, I picked her up, while her arms flailed away, and said with what little breath I had left, 'You either apologize or you're going into the pond.'
"She knew I meant it and finally relented."
Sally never went to Hyde, and her mother complained to Gauld later that he used "extreme" methods.
Of course, all students going to Hyde don't go through that kind of experience, but Gauld said they must understand they're responsible for their actions.
Unless they accept it, Gauld said it would be impossible for Hyde to give the student body such a strong voice in running the school.
Students help teachers decide on courses of study, the dress code, hair length, when to wear blue jeans and discipline for rules-breakers; responsibilities which Gauld believes continuously demand strength of character.
Hyde takes responsibility one step further. Seniors must rank their own graduation awards according to how they feel they have developed as a person rather than according to their class marks. (Gauld contends that if a student has met the requirements for a Hyde diploma, he or she is usually prepared-academically as a byproduct and has little trouble in college.)
At year's end (or if a student is expelled) parents are told they can have their full tuition payment back if they are not satisfied that going to Hyde benefited their child. So far, there have been no takers for that offer, Gauld said.
Hyde doesn't let go upon a student's graduation. Attempts are made to keep up with each other to find out how they're doing. If a student is judged not to have lived up to Hyde's values, the school may ask for its diploma back.
There are others than parents who have shown their approval of the Gauld-Hyde regimen. Foundations and friends have contributed some $1 million in funds to keep Hyde going over the past eight years.
The school has grown from an enrollment of 57 during the fall of 1966 to 170 this fall. It was accredited in 1970 by the New England Association of Colleges and Secondary Schools.
Tuition, which started at $2,600, has risen to $4,150 but that hasn't seemed to dampen the interest of parents who want to send their children there. Gauld says there's a waiting list of students who want to get into Hyde.
Thirty to 40 of the students are on scholarships but the others pay the full room and board price. Most of the scholarship students are blacks and Puerto Ricans.
Opening up Hyde to more minority groups through scholarships is something Gauld says he's committed to. More girls are also attending Hyde than ever before. Initially only boys boarded at Hyde. Now the ratio is 105 boys and 45 girls.
Along with the student body, the campus facilities have also grown. A $170,000 classroom wing has been added to the remodeled court. And covered courts have just opened in Brunswick, nine miles away by a four-lane highway.
But Gauld is an avid tennis player and even that has become a sometimes point of controversy. Gauld is known for getting quite angry with himself on the court and says he gets furious "because I've never conquered a tennis swing." Gauld has had partners walk off the court because of his tantrums, "but my opponents especially have been sensitive to my problems, as well as the kids."
"I understand my actions better after reading Jonathan Livingston Seagull," he said.
"Some people think it's a competitive thing, which is logical. I want to win, sure. But that's not what is at stake for me."
Gauld also says he's been delving into Zen Buddhism to understand how to control himself on the tennis court.
"I can't leave tennis alone," he said. "How do you accept things in life you feel you ought to be able to do and can't?"
Although Gauld knows he must still work at his character development on the court. It's partly due to his drive and won't-take-no-for-an-answer attitude that has gotten Hyde where it is today.
It has attracted Important men to look at Hyde, take an interest in and sit on its board of trustees, among them U.S. Sen. Edmund S. Muskle (D-Maine), Bath Iron Works vice president William E. Haggett and Robert Porteous, Jr., president of Porteous Mitchell & Braun Co.
Others on the board are John Chandler, Jr., of Boston, vice president of the National Association of Independent Schools; Duane D. Fitzgerald of Bath, a partner in the law firm of Fitzgerald and Donovan; David S. Knight of Marblehead, Mass., president of Massachusetts Machine Shop, Inc.; Stephen F. Leon, a consultant from South Harpswell; Leonard C. Mulligan of Bath, president of the Gibbons Oil Co.; Donald A. Spear, a Bath attorney; Philip J. Woodward of Winchester, Mass., a partner in Haussermann, Davison & Shattuck; Charles McKee, vice president of Casco Bank & Trust Co., Brunswick; G. William Fleming, president, Fleming Associates, Inc., Westport, Conn.; and Robert A.G. Monks of Cape Elizabeth.
With Hyde well on its way, Gauld has relinquished the reins of control over the day-to-day activities at the school. He remains in name headmaster, but it's Ed Legg who directs Hyde.
Gauld is Hyde's resident guru, serving as sort of a spiritual advisor who rides shotgun over the operational philosophy of the school.
One of his most important tasks is working with state educators who have shown an interest in developing pilot character development programs based on the Hyde experience [for] Maine's public schools.
At the behest of Gauld), state education commissioner Dr. Carroll McGary visited Hyde last January and went away convinced that Hyde had something good to offer public schools.
He talked to some school superintendents, and three (from Bath, Westbrook, and SAD 9 in Farmington) have been considering an experimental program for this fall. However, no decisions have been made yet.
McGary said, "My general reaction to Hyde is that it has developed an atmosphere where students can really understand their teachers care and come up with a successful system of parent commitment."
The commissioner said he questions some of Hyde's methods, especially in physically roughing up the students, "but there is a group of kids that has shown that it works for them."
To some former Hyde teachers, the prospect of letting Gauld's ideas and techniques loose in the public school system is tantamount to suicide.
One of those critical of Gauld's theories is Gerald Herlihy, director of the University of Maine at Orono's Onward program. Herlihy taught at Hyde during the first three years of its existence.
Ray Fisher of Freeport, who was a student of Gauld's and the first teacher hired by him for Hyde, said he feels Gauld is "so wrapped up in creating a model for education, it's at the expense of the kids.
"It's a big ego-trip, and the demands he places on the faculty are unbelievable; 24 hours a day," he said.
Fisher and Herlihy left Hyde because they disagreed with Gauld's character development approach, which they say feeds on the personal weakness of each student.
?Joe and I had a fierce personality conflict," said Herlihy, whose stormy relationship with Gauld resulted in his being fired several times by the headmaster.
"Joe has to dominate everyone. His approach is to find out a person's weakness. He grabs onto that, and no matter what type of progress a student makes, Joe always goes back to that weakness. He strips a person psychologically and gains control over them. Then he manipulates them to his values," said Herlihy.
The interview for student applicants is a prime example of that, Herlihy said. "Joe psychs out the dynamics between the children and their parents at these interviews and then goes after that kid. The kid is overwhelmed that a teacher would go to all that trouble. He or she eventually gives in."
Herlihy was initially impressed with Hyde when he went there in 1966 after several years of teaching in New York schools with Fisher.
"At first we were all pulling together to get the school going," he remembered. "Then it became clear Gauld wanted to control each of us, and if he couldn't, we were in trouble."
Herlihy said he and Gauld had numerous shouting matches over Hyde's philosophy and hypocrisy and that at the end of his tenure there, Gauld restricted his activities and his contact with the kids "because - he couldn't control me." He left in 1969 to direct Orono's Onward program, which recruits low-income students.
When Fisher was a student at New Hampton, Gauld was his coach in three sports. "He really impressed me favorably," Fisher remembers. "Although he seemed scatterbrained, he appeared to really be interested in kids.
"He struck me as a master statistician and manipulator as a coach. Helping kids was as much an ego trip for him as anything," he said.
In 1965 Fisher and his family were looking for somewhere else to locate, when Gauld called him ''out of the blue" and offered him a job at Berwick Academy. Fisher accepted. When Gauld left Berwick, Fisher followed.
"We teachers did everything the first year; taught, coached and counseled," Fisher said. "We had all our meals at school and lived on the back end of the campus."
Soon his opinion of Gauld changed drastically. "I began to see him as a master at propaganda... some sort of God who wanted those kids to embrace his beliefs."
One of the final incidents which influenced Fisher to leave Hyde was Gauld's refusal to permit the Bath
Brunswick Committee for Racial Undemanding (of which Fisher was a member) to meet on the Hyde campus in 1969. "Gauld said it was too controversial. It was the height of his hypocrisy," he said. Fisher now leaches at ML Ararat High School in Topsham.
Ed Legg, who was friends with Fisher and Herlihy and is described by them as "the company man," disagrees with their assessments of Gauld.
"He's probably the most dynamic, energetic individual I've ever met. Probably for me and most of us around here, he is a man of incredible conscience. He really cares about people, and though he tends to be impulsive at times, it's because he gets so deeply involved in things," said Legg, 31, a University of Texas Law School graduate, former political Worker and veteran of the civil rights and student movements.
Gauld has changed from "being a pretty conservative guy except for his educational philosophy to a true homebred American radical with an open mind," Legg said.
As for Hyde's approach to education, Legg said, "we're trying to radically change the educational philosophy in this country... so a different approach is necessary."
by Phyllis Austin
Maine Times - Joe Gauld Presents His Educational Philosophy to the WorldOriginal:
https://archive.org/details/mt-02-aug-1974-1/08-02-1974