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Volume 30, Number 2 |
Richardton, ND 58652 |
April 2002 |
Reminiscences of the Abbey School: II
by Fr. Terrence Kardong, O.S.B.
Fairness was another bedrock principle of mine, and I think I clung to it because I had suffered from its opposite on at least one occasion. Of course, we all do, but this case was a tough one. We used to have a long holiday at Easter time that lasted from a week before Good Friday to the Tuesday after Easter Sunday. Some of us were too poor to go home and the monks were generous enough to let us hang around or so we thought.
One year a friend and I celebrated the beginning of the vacation by lighting up a couple of cigars in the Chronicle Room, a notorious smoking den. We thought the smoking rules would not apply, since it was vacation. Just then a certain monk, the sacristan, appeared on the scene to ask us if we would mind getting up to serve 6 a.m. Masses the coming week. We said that we were on vacation, and that did not include such activities. He left without commenting on either the cigars or the refusal.
At supper time, though, all hell broke loose. The Principal stormed in and shouted at us that if we did not want to keep the rules, we would have to pay the penalty. We had a choice: either behave or get out! Some of the students sensed that there was big trouble ahead, so they packed right up and hitchhiked home. Those of us who stuck around got a memorable lesson in unfairness. On Monday morning we were all assigned to work duties that would last all week. My friend and I were put to digging post holes for a long fence that ran east of the chicken yard. The complication was that the ground was not yet fully thawed out. Others were put on cleaning crews to assist the sacristan, whom by then we were privately calling Judas Iscariot.
This cleaning and digging and raking went on all week, plus compulsory attendance (Mass serving) at all the long monastic services during the Triduum. When we worked up the courage to ask the Principal if we could walk downtown to the store, he kept turning his back on us. So instead of a vacation, we had a solid week of chores and church. There may have been aggravating circumstances. Perhaps the Principal was fed up with smoking. The truth was, though, that we were really not smokers! We had just lit up a sort of "victory cigar" as a lark. At any rate, we paid a heavy price, and we learned that invaluable lesson: "Life is not fair." I thought it was so then and I have not changed my mind since.
During my days as a student here, there was a sort of evolution from selective approval to total disapproval of tobacco. When I first arrived, the older students were permitted to smoke if they chose. There was even an indoor space reserved for them, the notorious "smokers' alley" in the north basement corridor. Eventually, though, that sort of laxity was renounced and smoking was completely verboten.
Yet the thing was easier said than done. Some of the boys were heavily addicted to nicotine, and no amount of punishment could stop them from smoking. To my knowledge, no one was ever expelled for smoking, but students were made to do penal work if they were caught. Some boys spent a lot of their free time working off their smoking penalties but the rest they spent smoking! Nothing was done to educate them about the dangers of smoking, nor was there much attempt to supply an attractive motivation to quit. The whole approach was penal, and it failed.
Of course, society itself provided very bad example in those days. Many, many people, including many of the monks, smoked. The advertisements were full of glamorous pictures of athletes and starlets lighting up and puffing away. Nobody was trying to quit, so there wasn't much awareness of how tenacious a drug nicotine really is. Nowadays schools are doing a much better job of convincing children to stay away from tobacco. You get lectured by your young relatives for lighting up. In those days they did nothing, except to try to fight fire with fire.
A Place Free From Women
The other evil from which the Abbey school attempted to shield its charges was women. There were no female students and there were no women on the faculty. True, there were some old nuns cooking for us and doing the laundry, but they didn't register with us as women. In the very last years of the high school, there were a few women on the faculty, but for most of its 70 years of existence, the Abbey school was as pristinely male as Mount Athos.
This was partly due to circumstance. For most of its history, the school had only monks on its faculty, and none of them were women. The Benedictine Sisters staffed St. Mary's High School for girls just two blocks away, and a monk or two occasionally taught over there, but there was no reciprocity. This was a school for boys run by men. When the day finally came that the junior college admitted a woman, I myself had my eyes opened. I was rushing around class passing out papers when I stumbled over a large purse on the floor between the desks. I believe I fell flat on the floor. In my befuddlement, I bellowed: "This never happened to me before we took in women!" But she was equal to the occasion, and shouted back: "Most men don't wear skirts!"
If there were no women on the staff, there certainly weren't any female students in our high school. They attended St. Mary's, and never the twain could meet. There was no official social contact between the two student bodies, except at sports events. Eventually we did have girls as cheerleaders, but that was precious little consolation. As we moved into the 1960s, however, some dances were arranged. I don't remember they were all that successful. Here again the circumstances were not favorable. At no time did St. Mary's ever have even half as many girls as the Abbey school had boys. They had a few boarders, but St. Mary's was basically a day school. What do you do with a hundred extra boys in a town of maybe 700? You keep them locked up!
Or rather you try to keep them locked up. There were some students who went to great
lengths to sneak downtown to see their girlfriends. One acrobatic fellow specialized
in climbing down the decrepit fire escape on the east end of the old science building.
Even the most vigilant prefect had to sleep sometime, but hormone-
In some respects, the absence of women did us no harm. The learning atmosphere in
single-
On the other side of the coin, it surely was not good for us to live apart from the tribe of women. During those formative years, we needed to learn to deal with the other half of the human race. We needed to have the example of women as our teachers, and we needed to learn how to relate to women as friends. None of this was possible during those years. Nobody seemed to see anything wrong with that kind truncated society. Today it probably would not pass muster.
Maybe the presence of women might have taken some of the harshness out of life in the Abbey school. Perhaps it would have provided us with some of the comforts of home that were pretty conspicuous by their absence. Here we had no privacy at all. We slept in large, open dormitories with very little space for our clothes and even less space for our psyches. It was mostly fun to live that kind of public life with a bunch of guys, but it could also be brutal. A little mothering in some form or other would have been a welcome relief from such a boot camp atmosphere.
What is more, women surely would have brought a touch of beauty to our lives. If there was anything that was in short supply around here, it was beauty. You never saw a painting, a flower or a pretty piece of clothing. It was all pretty drab and utilitarian, just the kind of atmosphere you would expect from a bunch of men. Women would have found some way to dress things up. Probably we would have even been a little more careful of our own grooming in the presence of women. As it was, ugliness was all too acceptable.
But the absence of women had other sad effects as well. Without women, the tendency is for a pack of males to descend to a kind of barracks mentality. Life coarsens; things are not kept properly clean; language becomes rough, and so do manners. In a group of boys, cruelty is always just below the surface as a possibility. One time I asked a man who had been prefecting the boys in a posh English prep school for years how he found his high class charges. "They are savages!" he hissed. The presence of women can have the effect of at least embarrassing the average male into some semblance of decency.
It might also have had an effect on some of the monks. A few of them were a bit too handy with their fists. One prefect actually cultivated a reputation of being a former Golden Gloves boxer. That was a handy deterrent to maintain discipline, but it rarely worked out well in practice. The spectacle of a grown man slapping up a scrawny youth never set well with me. There was something unfair about it, and I'm glad it happened rarely. Nowadays it would probably bring a visit from the sheriff. I doubt, though, if any of the monks would have indulged in physical discipline in front of women.
There was also another type of prefect who occasionally resorted to blows. This was
not the result of any cool calculation, but simply a loss of control. In the cases
I observed, this type of person had a long fuse, but when he blew there was real
mayhem. Today we would probably agree that such a person should not be working with
adolescent boys, who will at times provoke a saint. As early as the fourth century,
the Rule of St. Basil already noted that some adults are not well-
Lifestyle
In the previous section, I referred to the hard lifestyle lead by the students in our boarding school. This may merit some explanation, since some of it is almost unimaginable in our softer times.
As I noted, we had no privacy. There were none of those nice little private rooms that we associate with colleges and affluent prep schools. We lived in big, open spaces with nothing to shield us from the cruel drafts and gazes of the world. Not only did we lack closet space; we lacked any space at all where we could get away from the madding crowd. Everything was public. Indeed, it was much like the primitive monastic life described by St. Benedict in his Rule.
In recent years I have mused that in some ways we boys lived a more monastic life than the monks themselves. They probably did not consciously create a monastic lifestyle for the students, but that is what it was. They themselves had private rooms, of course, which would be considered absolutely necessary by a modern adult. But there was no way they could provide private rooms for us kids not at $500 a year. Moreover, we were roused out of bed at 5:30 and not permitted back into the dormitory until after school, if then. Like any teenager, we longed for our own space but no space was to be had. We also longed for more sleep. I never got used to the strange hours we kept: 5:30 a.m. to 9 p.m. I was permanently tired and fell asleep in many study halls. I simply did not get enough sleep.
Of course, on weekends we could hang around the dorms and that could be fun. Many
happy hours were spent shooting the breeze with your pals in the dorm. Or you could
spend time in the study halls, which were used for recreation in off-
We also lacked ordinary things to do. When you are away from home, you are cut off
from the things people do at home. You don't have domestic chores, you don't have
much space for your hobbies and other such things. Furthermore, you have too much
time on your hands. Nothing to do and no place to do it: a good formula for boredom
or worse. I am sure that the prefects dreaded those long weekends. I know that I
did when I was a prefect with forty 16-
What about food, a very, very important topic for teenagers? Well, it ranged from
the average to the ridiculous. When I first came here, the monks were still trying
to be self-
The lifestyle of the boys did improve somewhat from the time I was a student to the
time I was a prefect: 1950-
In my recollection, one of the main changes in the lifestyle of the students over the years was the great increase of noise. Of course, the boys could always raise a fearsome clatter, but as time went on they were greatly assisted in this endeavor by the invention of rock and roll plus sound systems to blast it out to the world. Everywhere you went there was this infernal noise, and gradually it wore you down. I would have to say that this was one of the things that soured me on prefecting.
But even in earlier, quieter times, prefecting was a tough go. Imagine being with
teenage boys almost continually for nine months out of the year! Not just one or
two kids at home, but 150 of them in a large, unruly herd. Most of our students did
not go home on weekends; they were here full-
There was, however, another side to this matter. It may have been hard for the prefects and other monks to spend so much time with the boys, but nobody can say that they neglected them. In fact, we saw each other a lot outside of class time. We interacted socially on many levels. On weekends, the boys could pick potatoes with the monks, play handball with the monks, play music with the monks. Certainly there was a good deal of modeling that went on, although most of the monks did not pretend to be plaster saints. Perhaps that is what we liked about them.
But it would be silly to think that the primary influence on the boys was the monks.
Teenagers are mostly influenced by their peers; they teach each other. Here in the
Abbey school we spent an enormous amount of time just hanging out with each other,
scratching graffiti on the soft brick wall on the east side of the monastery, short-
Personally, I found it pretty invigorating. I was from a big city, one of the few kids here who was not rural. At first this was a problem; I did not know the first thing about farm life or farm talk, so I was constantly scorned as an ignoramus or worse. But gradually I learned what not to say. Even though I was a seminarian, I am glad I did not attend a regular seminary that is, a school only for students for the priesthood. It was good to be among "normal" boys during those years. Sometimes it was a bit shocking to someone from a rather sheltered background, but it did give me a realistic idea of how the real world works.
Academics
By this point, someone might wonder when we will get to the point: isn't school about
learning? Wasn't the Abbey school a place where you could get a fine education? The
answer to that question has to be nuanced, since it varied from time to time. Certainly
there were times when the Abbey school was first-
My own experience was not quite so good. I had a good grade school education with the Dominican Sisters in Minneapolis, so I had some idea of what good teaching looked like. Not too many of the monks looked like good teachers! I got the sneaking suspicion that some of them were barely staying ahead of us in the textbook, for the simplest question would throw them for a loop. Some of them were excellent, but others were simply not up to snuff.
In later years, it became clear to me how this could be. First of all, there is the
simple fact that one does not join a monastery to become a teacher. The two vocations,
monk and teacher, have no intrinsic connection. One may be an excellent monk, but
have little gift for teaching. In the case of most monasteries in this country, and
certainly that was the case here in Richardton, the school is the main work of the
community. Therefore, most of the priest-
How to maintain high standards in a monastic school? The logical way would be to require that a person be a proven teacher before being admitted into the community. But few monasteries would be willing to take such a step. At the other extreme, when truly high standards are enforced, the monks may have a hard time qualifying to teach in their own school. But the typical situation in the 1950s was that a monastic school was an easygoing place where almost any monk would be allowed to demonstrate his aptitude or ineptitude for a while.
In the case of Assumption Abbey, there were further extenuating circumstances. For a long time the community was simply too impoverished to educate its members up to a proper level for teaching. When the monastery was refounded in 1928, the physical conditions could not have been worse. The worldwide economic depression and the devastating effects of the Dust Bowl combined to keep the monks reduced to the bare essentials of survival. There was simply no money to send monks to expensive graduate schools to prepare them for teaching. Many of the monks were talented, but they could not teach because they never had good teachers themselves. It was like the vicious cycle that prevents universities in the Third World from breaking out of their mediocrity: lack of Ph.D.s
By 1950, however, things began to change. A few of the monks had obtained advanced degrees in the late '40s, and all of the younger monks were obtaining undergraduate degrees from respectable Benedictine universities. The effects of this new development were noticeable. Some of our teachers now knew a good deal more than they had to use on the high school level. The contrast with untrained teachers was painful.
