If we assembled a team of Proctor historians for a debate, they would have a ball arguing the extent to which the Fowler Revolution of 1971 (and years following) was total. In the '70s and '80s--exhilarated by the empowerment of the new model--we probably exaggerated the degree to which Proctor had been reborn. With hindsight, I believe I was guilty of this, as I described the school to visitors in the admission office. As the decades pass, it is possible to trace enduring characteristics rooted in the 1940s, '50s and '60s.

In response to harsh fiscal realities in the '30s and '40s, the school put students to work maintaining the plant, and broadened the curriculum to include practical arts such as machine shop, woodshop and boat building, all of which are flourishing today as "skills courses".

As the community redefined itself in the '70s, overt applications of David's dream of experiential education--Mountain Classroom, programs abroad, Wilderness Orientation, Project period--distracted us from seeing how much of our heritage had survived. Today, experiential methods are most obvious in college preparatory classrooms, like French 2, where students play a version of Pictionary:

In fact, the first thing that survived was a curriculum that was relatively traditional for a school that was suddenly first-name, wearing jeans and trashing seniority. This is advanced Placement English taught by Tom Eslick, who started in 1974:

And I'm sure we had Red Sox fans before 1971. They're easy to spot today.