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The Importance of Faith Mr. Boyden was religious, and prayed frequently. This was an area of his life that he kept “New England private,” but as a family member disclosed: “He goes into nothing without praying. He prays all the time. He has consummate faith that the Lord will take care of him.” Mr. Boyden’s faith and prayer should not surprise us once we learn that, in his youth, he attended three Congregational Church services every Sunday and said, “The only reason I didn’t go to four is that there wasn’t a fourth one, I’m sure of that.” It should be no surprise, then, that in his early years, he read the Bible every morning to his public high school students, and why Sunday Evening Sings with a clergyman speaking were held every week for his preparatory school boys. Perhaps Mr. Boyden knew (and drew strength from) the Latin roots of our word, confidence—con fidere (to trust, have confidence), and especially an even earlier root— con fides (with faith). Perhaps he recognized that to achieve anything (whether we believe in a Higher Being or not) we all need strength—divine or from other humans—that is beyond any mere individual.
Ideals and Trust Ideals motivate, and trust is the basis of every good and lasting human relationship and achievement. This was one of Mr. Boyden’s bedrock beliefs-in-practice. “He always stands for and fights for the absolute best,” said one of his faculty, “Hence, people go along with him.” And as one of Mr. Boyden’s biographers wrote, “His words invariably agreed with his deeds.” Nor was the recognition of Mr. Boyden’s high ideals and trust limited to the relatively immaculate “lily fields” of academia. Product of Boston’s bare-knuckle politics and long-time Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives, Democrat John McCormack served with Mr. Boyden at the Massachusetts Constitutional Convention of 1917–1918. Almost fifty years later, McCormack said of his lifelong friend, “He is truly one of God’s noblemen, a man dedicated to God, Mankind, and to Country.” Mr. Boyden’s exemplary reputation also may explain what author John McPhee called “One of the most extraordinary gestures in the history of American education”—the salvation of an academy that had lost taxpayers’ funding in its shift from public to private status. In 1924, three headmasters—Lewis Perry of Exeter, Alfred Stearns of Andover, and Horace Taft of Taft—volunteered to raise one million dollars for Deerfield (they actually raised $1.5 million) from their own alumni because they believed in and trusted Mr. Boyden and what he already had accomplished. And while he was renowned for
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game-time pep talks that urged his teams to “Keep it at a high level,” Mr. Boyden would usually end by saying, “Now boys, let’s not let up on them for a minute. Let’s win this one, if possible, by forty points.”
The Importance of Family Family is the alpha and omega of life—the source of our greatest sorrows and joys, and the wellspring of our learning. We may not have realized it as students, but Mr. Boyden consciously patterned Deerfield on the family. There was no written regulation book as at every other school (what family has one?), students were almost never expelled (which family “expels” a child?), sit-down meals were at family-styled tables with at least one adult present, and the school gathered together at least once a day in an Evening Meeting—as a family might gather at the end of the day. Our Deerfield may have been a patriarchal place, but if so, Mrs. Boyden was its mother— solicitous, kind, encouraging, a good listener with faith in each boy—for, as every good mother knows, it is not fear and punishment but care and trust that bring out the best in us.
Mr. Boyden’s Well Rounded Education Mr. Boyden was often described as a superb, intuitive educator, but without a “stated philosophy” or “theory” of education. Such categorizations miss the point. Mr. Boyden may not have had a stated philosophy or theory of education—but as a pragmatic New Englander he had something more enduring— principles. Among them were that his school should be located in a wholesome rural community and based on the family, as well as an unshakable belief in the essential goodness and reasonableness of boys, if not humanity. Further, that a Deerfield education should be aimed at the development of each individual, the whole person, body, mind, and spirit— body via required athletics for all to build courage, sportsmanship, and teamwork; mind via a curriculum that intellectually challenged, but left room for curiosity as well as the love of knowledge to take root and grow; and spirit via not just Sunday Evening Sings but, as Tom Ashley, Class of 1911 insightfully/gently put it: “. . . ethics cannot be treated as a formal subject. All the means of encouraging a student to stand for the right things in life must be indirect . . . through the tone of the school. An underlying almost unconscious feeling that the school shall stand for the right things.”