Harris Silverman
Attended Thornton Hall 1974-1978
Taught French and Math at Thornton Hall 1978-1982
e-mail: harsil1@yahoo.com
Hi,
all. It's good to see a few familiar faces from long ago here, as well
as
some new ones.
I'm currently living and working in New York City. After stints as a teacher -- a real one, with a B.Ed. and a certificate and everything; not a Thornton-style one -- and in HR management, I now work on large-scale business-management software implementations. I enjoy living in New York very much, due in large part to the cultural stuff -- music, galleries, theatre, etc. I've been divorced for about a year now.
This site has played a great role in bringing people back together, at least for me. Some old friendships have been re-established thanks to the site, after a 25-year hiatus. I have even been reunited with a friend from my days in Switzerland, who did a search on my name and found my page here; I visited him recently in Lausanne. So mucho thanks to the glowing bunny for that. As well as for the general hilarity of the site. The home-page reminiscence is hilarious, and captures the feel of the place perfectly. And the reproduced letters and other docs -- wheat-germ, study notes, etc -- bring tears to my eyes every time I look at them. (Did anybody catch that misspelled "minuscule" on the thank you note?) Reminds me of the days when June Broome -- as she once was -- and Mackey used to sit in that small room on the ground floor (the one with the white shag carpet) in front of their new front-projection big-screen TV, watching "Happy Days" and eating take-out from Swiss Chalet! The things you learn when you stay late to get the old portfolio finished up on time...
Having said all that, however, I'm afraid on balance I don't really share the general attitude of light-hearted mirth that seems to surround most people's recollections of Thornton. The place did a lot of harm to a lot of people, and some of them paid the price for a long time; and I think that side of things needs to be expressed.
When I first looked at this site, my initial reaction was to wonder why all the comments were so uniformly light and positive. Was I really the only one with a different perspective? Then I noticed how many people hadn't gotten in touch to set up an alumnus page for themselves. It could be because they haven't heard about the site, or because they're just not "computer people." But somehow I doubt it.
Having spent four years as a teacher [at Thornton] -- inappropriate in itself; they hired people with no teaching qualifications, because it was cheap -- in addition to four as a regular inmate, perhaps I saw a little more of the place than some other people might have done. The impression I came away with was that of a profound lack of professional and personal ethics in an atmosphere of real insanity, where the primary role of students was to act as a captive audience for a truly delusional personality who simply needed a forum in which to feed her own psychological needs and fantasies. Secondary roles included those of cash cow and forced tango partner.
I realize that some people feel that they were helped by the school. The common refrain is that "I was a wild child, and Miss Greig gave me discipline." So far that's the only positive I've heard; several people who were out of control were so terrorized by her that they fell into line.
And I suppose that's good as far as it goes. But is that really what a school is supposed to be, a sort of psychological prison for wayward girls (for some reason all the people who have said that to me have been female)? And are we sure that that wasn't just a fortuitous side-effect of a broader, much more damaging program? It seems to me that it was only her need to dominate children psychologically, to bludgeon them into the role of mirroring her delusions back to her, that created the impression of discipline.
How can that benefit be squared with the large number of students who found themselves totally unprepared for university, and with those who made asses of themselves walking into art history classes spouting some drivel about the archetype of the Woman with the Fat Ass, or whatever it was, thinking they were just the cleverest little bunny there ever was?
(As far as the application of Jungian psychology to the study of art is concerned, alumni may find Jung's essay "On the Relation of Analytical Psychology to Poetry" illuminating; Jung talks about the inadequacy of treating a work of art as a cipher for a simple, one-dimensional psychological concept. It reads so much like a rejection of Angela's approach, at first I thought he knew the dear lady! He was actually attacking Freud, however.)
The Province of Ontario requires -- or at least did in the past -- an academic record to be maintained, listing courses taken by each student. It also has -- or had -- requirements as to which courses needed to be taken by seniors in order to qualify for graduation; there was a certain breakdown between sciences, math, language, etc., that had to be observed. I saw my record one day toward the end of my final year (or perhaps shortly thereafter), as completed by Countess Grakkula herself. She had me down for Grade 13 biology and several other things I also hadn't taken, in a year when I had done almost nothing but literature and art history à la Grakk. Art history was recorded as biology. The record, in other words, was falsified, and I didn't actually meet the requirements for my diploma. Imagine my surprise! I never graduated high school! And you probably didn't either!
On top of that, there were all the everyday pathological lies. She had a degree from Oxford, yet there was no sign of a diploma in her office. Her degree was in art history, but she didn't know how to pronounce basic terms like "Ingres," "Ghiberti," "Cimabue" and "bottega," despite the fact that she was fluent in French and Italian too, on top of all her other accomplishments. (Actually, she didn't know how to spell "bottega" either; she could at least have looked that up!) And of course, she was a member of the Archaeological Institute of America, which gave her great authority. I was a member of the Archaeological Institute of America too, for a while; that was the year I subscribed to Archaeology magazine: Membership in the Institute is free with your $15 subscription fee. You even get a little cardboard membership card to impress your friends!
This is without going into all the inane, pseudo-academic garbage that she used to come out with. Those of you who were actually interested in the subject matter, as I was, may have had a similar experience to mine, whereby, in pursuing these interests over the intervening years, I discovered, among other things, that she had taught as fact, in the mid-1970s, a theory of the Egyptian dynastic succession that was developed around 1900 and was fully discredited in the 1930s (doesn't that fit perfectly somehow? She always seemed like she just stepped out of a silent Bela Lugosi movie); that she got most of her information about Michelangelo from Condivi's hagiographic biography, universally regarded as a highly untrustworthy fabrication by real art historians; that several authors have had the honor of having their exact words -- whole sentences, in fact -- come out of the great lady's mouth in class, as though she just thought of it herself! And so on, and so on, and so on... Most of what she "taught" about the arts was just obfuscatory pseudo-mystical bullshit, with very little real substance; the rest was just undigested quotes and references taken out of context. Academically, I think she was a complete phony.
It seems to me that, while they were there, a lot of people had a sort of uncertainty about the place and about the general environment there -- a strong sense that the place wasn't quite right, but also an inability to articulate the issue or to know just what was going on, because they were both taken in and mentally bullied, and because everybody else seemed to be going along with it. They didn't quite know what to think, or how to act about it. You see these little discrepancies and so on, and you turn a blind eye to them, or figure it must be all right somehow, or it's not that serious; and then years later you write the kind of light and obligatorily cheerful stuff that appears on this site, because everyone else is doing the same, and nobody wants to piss in everyone else's swimming pool.
Well, it isn't all right somehow. Schools do not exist for the self-indulgence of the teachers, psychological or otherwise; students are not there for personal gratification. There's a difference between being a strong personality with a constructive, educational role to play, and coming across like a tornado because you're completely insane and you can't help spewing your psychoses all over anyone who happens to wander within range. Being made to play a bit part in someone else's psychological problems is not the role of children. People's minds were taken possession of, for the selfish purposes of others, and a lot of people were fucked up by it. Growing up in a land of bunnies and unicorns -- the bunnies and unicorns of someone else's diseased mind -- isn't as funny as some folks seem to think. Let's all snap out of it, people, and call a spade a spade.*
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School Ties: Thornton Hall Alumni
Yearbook: Photos and Memorabilia
Thornton Hall Private School, Thornton Hall Private High School
Thornton Hall High School, Thornton Hall School