Photograph by Kevin A. Roberts
The varsity basketball team huddles with coach Boaz Roth, then springs back and yells, full-throated: “Arete!”
This is how one cheers at Thomas Jefferson School.
Arete (ar-uh-tay) means excellence, the kind attained when one lives up to one’s full potential—which, at TJ, means studying Latin and ancient Greek; Italian or French; Advanced Placement literature, history, and science; and accelerated math. Often students watch the games with calculus books open on their laps.
“I like coaching basketball, and I think I’m pretty good at it,” says Roth, “but I’ll never know how good I am, because I have no players!” TJ’s total enrollment, spanning grades seven through 12, is 88 students. “We don’t have the big-time jocks—why would they want to come here?”
“I hate competitive sports,” says senior Jack Hasler. His hair’s a tad long and sticking out in various directions, mixing the message of his crisp navy blazer. “Luckily, I have not had to be in that circle yelling ‘Arete!’” He pauses. “I’ve never been too ashamed of it, though. It definitely shows who we are.”
The stereotype—if people have even heard of TJ—is “Ooh, the rich-kid preppy school,” Hasler says. “But most of us are there either because we are smart and we have money, or, as in my case, we are smart and we get scholarships. TJ was founded to let poorer Midwesterners have a chance to go to Ivy League schools.”
He came to TJ after sixth grade, because he wanted to go to a small, private school where brains mattered. “I’d been to public school and had some bad experiences with bullying,” he explains. “I was sort of the geek. And looking the nerd’s not going to help either.”
At TJ, “there’s hardly any bullying,” Hasler says, the relief still in his voice six years later. “There was an isolated case earlier this year down in the seventh and eighth grades, but four or five of us seniors immediately jumped on it and went to talk to them. It was like a two-minute conversation—one of us said, ‘Hey, that wasn’t cool.’”
One wonders, in a school that’s already so different from the norm, what gets kids teased. Certainly not nerdiness. “It’s more like…being short,” offers senior Maheetha Bharadwaj. “Or the Koreans have this wild fascination with curry, so they call me Curry Munchkin. Everyone starts tagging fun names to everyone else.”
Bharadwaj’s personality alternates between bubbly and solemn—every few seconds. She isn’t much over 5 feet tall, but she plays on TJ’s women’s basketball team, and in her opinion, the cheer is “very important to TJ culture—just Greek in general is. It’s been part of our curriculum for ages, eras, and epochs. I actually feel no hesitation or reluctance to shout out the cheer.”
“Other schools have cheers, and we have ‘Arete!’” adds sophomore Genevieve Agar. “It’s not just something you can make up; there’s something behind it.”
The basketball coach would know; he also teaches ancient Greek. And literature and math. When Roth interviewed at TJ, he told the head of the school, “If you don’t want to hire me, that’s OK, but I want to come back and be a student here!” At 6-foot-4, his head shaved to a gleam, he has the look of somebody who started out gangly and grew, much later, into easy confidence. “You are a bunch of nerds,” he tells his students cheerfully. “Your parents are nerds, and so are the teachers. Like attracts like.”
Classes at TJ last only 35 minutes and end by 1:10 every afternoon. Then students strip off the ties and jackets, throw on a TJ sweatshirt, and manage the rest of their time themselves. “I didn’t realize there would be six hours of homework,” says Agar, who started at TJ this fall as a five-day-a-week boarder. “And then there’s studying.”
Agar has a poised innocence; she looks like a chic French schoolgirl in her red plaid coat, tapered black slacks, and heels. “I don’t think I’ve ever made such a big adjustment,” she says, thinking back to those first two weeks. “You have to push yourself to do your work. And at the end of the day, if it’s really stressful, you can’t go home. You can’t get away from it. Even though I have really good friends at TJ, when you are living with them and learning with them and eating with them all the time, it just builds up.”
About half of TJ’s students board. Head of school William C. Rowe has his arguments well-rehearsed: “When you are a teenager, you are champing at the bit to be independent and lead your own life. When you do that in a boarding-school setting, you get that measure of independence, but you’re still living under a clear structure with clear rules. And they are the same rules for everybody—nobody can go around saying, ‘Johnny’s mother lets him do this!’”
Rowe boarded here himself. At 22, he joined the faculty; this year, at 66, he will retire. He’s built a world-class reputation for TJ, even though it remains almost invisible in St. Louis. About a third of the student body is international; many students come from Pacific Rim countries, Roth says, “because TJ may be one of the few places as challenging as what they left behind.”
It opened in 1946 as a boarding school for boys. The founders—Robin W. McCoy, Charles E. Merrill Jr. (whose father co-founded Merrill Lynch), and Graham K. Spring—were Harvard men who shared the same foxhole in World War II Italy. They realized there wasn’t a boarding school between Chicago, Ill., and Austin, Texas, that wasn’t military or religious. So they chose St. Louis, right in the middle, with the requisite symphony orchestra and good theater.
Ken Colston, who teaches Latin and English and co-directs admissions, describes how they came upon a Tudor mansion on 20 acres in South County, built by the Meyer family, which lost its banking fortune during the crash. “The Catholic church was bidding on it, too,” Colston says, “so Charlie Merrill knew it had to be good.”
Today, the campus has the worn-tweed, sherry-before-dinner feel of an English country estate. No glitz or frills, serious architecture (the 1953 gymnasium was designed by William Bernoudy), cottage-like dorm rooms, and a high-ceilinged building dedicated to art and theater (lots of dark, mordant British comedies).
“Robin wanted academic rigor,” continues Colston. “He wanted to be able to kick kids out for not studying, not just for smoking or drinking. He knew about eight languages, and he was big on memory work; he once had to memorize 2,000 lines of Shakespeare. ‘A man will work harder for himself than for anyone else,’ he liked to say. He hated the way Deerfield Academy scheduled every minute of a kid’s time,” he says, referring to the Massachussetts boarding school. “We’ve kept all these things. We still have kids recite Shakespeare and poetry, even in other languages.
“We are all teachers, everyone in administration,” Colston notes. “And trustees.” Of the current TJ board’s 14 members, seven are senior faculty members. “Cambridge and Oxford,” he says. “That’s where the founders stole the method.”
Is TJ’s atmosphere too Brady Bunch for romance to thrive?
“People do date,” Bharadwaj says. “People do have crushes.” Liaisons become common knowledge: “When a rumor starts, it gets to the whole school in, like, five minutes,” she says. “But if the person denies it, that also goes around quickly.”
TJ keeps old-fashioned rules about intervisitation (students must leave the blinds open). “If we discover kids have been getting together, we deal with it on a private basis, but we take it very seriously,” says Rowe. “We inform the parents; we arrange counseling. The stated policy is, ‘Not on our campus.’” So, what, they should sign out and go to a motel? “Or one of their homes, as is usually the case,” he says wryly. “It can’t be here. And we want them to think very hard and take it slow.”
Other infractions are dealt with more publicly. Students run the honors court (which investigates possible plagiarism) themselves, and they are involved in the judicial council and the appeals court. Bharadwaj says she’s gotten a few demerits for having food in her dorm room. “But I’ve never been on doghouse—21 demerits—or instant court. That’s usually from being in somebody’s room after-hours.”
Students also help devise punishments, like making a student with a hopelessly messy room clean up the entire campus. Or assigning a chronically late student to take attendance in the morning.
Are there problems with drugs or alcohol? “All schools have stuff like that,” Bharadwaj says. “I really don’t wish to lie. But we have less of them, because the relationship between the students and teachers is so casual and so strong. The students themselves will tell the teachers if something’s becoming a problem, and the teachers will act on it.”
TJ is so small that the great divide between teachers and students closes; relationships resemble those in Dead Poets Society.
“At lunch, often if we are having a good discussion in class, you know, about a book, we’ll continue that,” Agar says. “Sometimes I’ll sit with my English teacher because we have the same lunch period. Sometimes I sit with a few seniors and their English teacher. They like to talk about their books. They read Chesterton and Aristotle.”
Do they ever talk about frivolous things at lunch? “I’m sure we do,” she says vaguely.
When it came time for last year’s senior prank, Colston says, “We told the class, ‘Make it clever, make your statement, but think about how much dislocation there’s going to be.’” In past years, they’d blocked a hallway with cement blocks and turned everything in the school—books, chairs, tables—upside down. After the admonition, “They came and set up a tent on the lawn in the middle of the night, right around Pan there,” Colston says, pointing to a statue of the Greek god. “They brought in horses and ponies and gave free rides.”
The first four minutes of the first day after winter break, in four classrooms chosen at random: a reminder of the special rule for neuter in ancient Greek; a foray into Brahmin funeral rites; a calculus demonstration by the head of school; and a quiz on radical expressions (in math, not politics).
TJ students’ average SAT score is 2050, which, according to Boarding School Review (boardingschoolreview.com), is the eighth highest at any boarding school in the nation, outstripping both Choate Rosemary Hall and Deerfield Academy. TJ students’ transcripts and GPAs don’t soar quite as high—because they’re uninflated. “Our grades are austere,” Colston says. “We did a survey and asked college admissions people if our grades were hurting the kids, and they said, ‘No, don’t change them.’” Instead, TJ sends along a school profile to put the grades in perspective.
“To get an A, you have to struggle,” says Bharadwaj. “Zero is perfect and five is failing on every quiz. Zero is put in as 100 percent, but you have to be perfect—even a single spelling error, and you have a 90. And then if you make one more error, it’s an 80. I do hate it a little bit, because sometimes it gets a little unfair. But it’s helped me reach perfection, rather than just getting things done. I double-check, I revise, I self-edit.”
When Bharadwaj started at TJ in seventh grade, she says her critical reading score on standardized tests was abysmally low. “I just took the PSAT, and I’m 95th percentile, and 98th [percentile] overall.” In college, she intends “a dual major in molecular biology and macroeconomics,” in case she winds up in hospital administration, and a minor in music. Her parents are thinking Midwest; she’s thinking one of the coasts.
Hasler’s already received his early acceptance from Haverford College near Philadelphia, where he will study political science, history, or both. “Even though we have exceptionally high SAT and ACT scores, we actually don’t have any ACT or SAT prep,” he says. “I think us learning Latin and Greek is a reason we do so well. I really wasn’t a fan of learning a dead language. I thought, ‘I’m never going to meet anyone other than my mother’”—a professor of classical languages at Saint Louis University—“‘who actually speaks these languages!’ But the vocabulary and sentence structure do help you.”
It’s more than vocabulary, Roth says. “Everything we do in our lives is done for the sake of speed. Well, no one can do Greek fast. A verb has six pieces of information that have to be decoded before you can even begin to translate.” His point being, you can’t just memorize the forms. “You have to learn principles, and how to analyze. I was an average student in high school, but if you give me enough time and quiet, I can learn anything.”
Do his students get as excited about the curriculum’s rigor? “They hate it,” he says. “Of course they hate it. But when they come back as college students, they say college is easy. A girl came back from Stanford and said, ‘It’s ninth-grade English!’
“The books stay with them; the ideas stay with them,” he continues. “We are not Luddites, but I personally am skeptical about how technology transforms a classroom. This is a school that thrives on reading and conversation. People aren’t on cellphones, they’re not fixing their hair, and the jocks aren’t in back flexing their muscles. You walk in and ask who killed old man Karamazov, and you’re off for 35 minutes, talking about murder and God.”
TJ’s website offers the following rationale for the humanities: “If eager, able young minds are allowed to wander and waste, they may grow so bored, distracted, or empty that the tough intellectual work of the professions is simply too much later on… We want students to be able to choose their walk in life freely, not to have their steps determined by a weak or lopsided curriculum. We want to give them an education that is never out of date.”
For Roth, the point is the ability to explore new worlds, recognize universals. “The world is filled up with a lot of smaller things made into bigger things,” he remarks. “You might start with Jane Austen’s drawing room, and then get a little further and realize, ‘My God, this is Homer!’ Three thousand years ago, someone figured, ‘I can tell a story that will resonate past the story.’ We are just the latest links in the chain.”
Alumnus John Biggs, who went on to major in Greek at Harvard University and lead the TIAA-CREF investment fund, helped pay for a recent TJ expansion. He received, in return, the privilege of choosing a quotation to hang in the classics classroom. He chose Socrates: “No person should live an unexamined life.”
In Greek.
Click here for a peek inside a class at Thomas Jefferson School.
