ABSTRACT
The first school I remember was a private day school in Swiss Cottage, London, to which I walked every morning from my home in St John’s Wood. This was followed by three years of public middle school in Princeton, New Jersey; two miserable years in boarding school in New York State; and two much happier years in Pennsylvania. Little did I know that my paternal grandmother and her father had also been sent to boarding schools, and hated them. When it came to my own children, I enrolled them in the Little Red School House, a private day school founded in 1921 by Elisabeth Irwin that has become a bastion of progressive education.
