Most independent schools began as a gleam in some educator's eye: an idea, a space, a handful of students, and at last a school.
Between the Civil War and World War II, small schools based on individual dreams sprouted up all over the country. Many, like Mr. Rivers' Open-air School for Boys (now The Rivers School) and Miss Madeira's School (now The Madeira School), survived to become successful modern schools. Others, like the Brownmoor School for Girls, ensconced in the early 1940s in a Santa Fe hotel, and the nearby Los Alamos Ranch School, commandeered in 1942 to be the building site for the A-bomb, are only memories.
In The Yonahlossee Riding Camp for Girls: A Novel (Riverhead, 2013), Anton DiSclafani offers us an imagined version of one of the latter. Yes, in 1930 it's a camp in the Blue Ridge Mountains, but it also offers a year-round experience as a school.
The storyline: Thea Atwell, age 15, having committed an unnamed but apparently unpardonable sin back among her Florida family, is packed off to Yonahlossee, based on an old connection between her mother and the head's wife. Summer ends, and Thea finds herself sentenced to year-round exile at the school. She makes friends and enemies, competes for (and wins) the coveted riding award, seduces the headmaster, and gradually reveals the secret of her great transgression. It's all pretty bad.
Coming of age and discovering her power, Thea is more Moll Flanders than Holden Caulfield. The ease with which she enfolds the scholarly, naïve school head within her, uh, womanly aura is a bit unnerving, as is the detail provided by the talented Ms. DiSclafani, whose prose is sometimes shockingly vigorous.
This unsettling story is also occurring at an unsettling time, with the Depression eating away at the wealth of Thea's classmates' families. The school itself teeters on the brink of insolvency, and at times one rather eagerly awaits Götterdämmerung and the dissolution of the whole place. It doesn't happen, but it seems fated.
What strikes us is not so much the plot or characterization, although Thea is certainly complex and her story, which includes flashbacks on her life after Yonahlossee, is messy and compelling in its way. What caught our attention — and should fascinate other educators — is the school itself, a higgledy-piggledy assemblage trying to hold to its founders' idea: a "respite for girls in a rapidly changing world." Even under the weak-kneed head and in the early stages of what must surely be an institutionally fatal tailspin, there is a lingering pride among its students and staff, especially around the equestrian program.
There is a darker side to a consideration of The Yonahlossee Riding Camp for Girls. In the 21st century, we like to believe that we've figured out a few things. With our laws against bullying, hazing, and sexual molestation and our criminal background checks, we try to ensure that bad things won't happen to kids. Our schools are subject to accreditation if they want to sustain themselves, and our infrastructures are inspected and regulated. Today, we may trust, but we must also verify.
In the era of Yonahlossee, many schools operated on trust alone. That so many survived and have evolved into robust institutions with fine reputations and strong financial underpinnings is a tribute to the quality of their founders' visions and characters. We assume that many of those that did not last were simply victims of time and circumstance.
But it's hard not to see the Yonahlossee Riding Camp for Girls as an exemplar of something fundamentally unsound. With so many larger and more recognized schools around in 1930, why would anyone have sent a child to a place like Yonahlossee? In Thea's case, the reason is clear, but what dysfunction or drying up of affection underlies the situations of her schoolmates? Unregulated, unaccredited, and barely visible on the map, Yonahlossee is no "respite," no safe harbor; it's simply a place to which girls are sent.
Our times seem to keep complicating parents' and children's lives, but in many ways this trend hit full swing in the 1920s and has never slowed. Schools proliferated in that era in response to the suddenly baffling complexity of trying to raise kids in the midst of so many societal changes; it was inevitable that a few of those schools would be sad failures. The Yonahlossee Riding Camp for Girls gives us a window into one of those failures, where, despite material comfort, children were left to figure out life for themselves, like so many Dickens orphans on the streets of London.