The Great Boarding School Furniture Con
Why America’s elite prep schools brag about their tables
I have spent a lot of time reporting on boarding/prep school culture, sometimes in earnest (see this piece about religious life at Exeter), sometimes with semi-ironic, half-mocking, but ultimately perhaps-sincere tongue-in-cheekery (see this piece about the new, updated edition of The Preppy Handbook effed up something truly wonderful). Somewhere in my travels, I became aware that boarding schools, particularly of the New England variety (genus Pedagogica, species andoverium) are obsessed with the tables at which students sit.
This is not a joke. This is all too real. There is something called a “Harkness table,” which schools from Exeter to Andover, from St. Paul’s to Lawrenceville, tout on their websites, in their alumni magazines, and in their spiffy, shiny catalogues. They claim that by sitting around this particular table, students learn better than if they were sitting at desks in rows, better even than if they sat at some other sort of table. They claim that the specific shape and size of this table, the Harkness table, improves pedagogy and actually turns out students of higher character.
They really say this. I began taking note of the Harkness table ideology about fifteen years ago, and I have tracked it ever since. It apparently originated at Exeter in the 1930s and spread, like kudzu—nay, like ivy.
On the website of Phillips Academy Exeter, known to those in the know as Exeter, there is a page labeled “Harkness.” It is illustrated with this picture:
Students at a table, right?
No, it is much more than that. Much, much more.
The text reads:
At Exeter, Harkness is more than a pedagogy. It’s a way of life. It begins in the classroom and extends beyond it, to field, stage and common room. It’s about collaboration and respect, where every voice carries equal weight, even when you don’t agree.
Exeter’s Harkness method was established in 1930 with a gift from Edward Harkness, a man who believed learning should be a democratic affair. It is a simple concept: Twelve students and one teacher sit around an oval table and discuss the subject at hand. [My bolding. —MO]
What happens at the table, however, is, as Harkness intended, a “real revolution.” It’s where you explore ideas as a group, developing the courage to speak, the compassion to listen and the empathy to understand.
It’s not about being right or wrong.
It’s a collaborative approach to problem solving and learning. We use it in every discipline and subject we teach at Exeter.
Elsewhere on the page, you can read:
IT’S WHO WE ARE
Harkness exists in every part of life at Exeter, not just academics. The confidence and connections you make at the table — the support you and your peers provide to each other — carry through into social, athletic, artistic and extracurricular pursuits.
Still elsewhere on the page, the principal of Exeter—they have a principal, not a headmaster, which is an awesome example of prep understatement—is quoted as saying:
Our differences are how we express our common humanity. Understanding that — valuing it — is what I think Harkness drives us toward.
On the website of the Lawrenceville School, in New Jersey, we read this bit of puffery:
This is from Shore Country Day School, in Beverly, Mass:
This is from the Belmont Hill School, a day school outside Boston that used to whoop on my alma mater, the Loomis Chaffee School, in soccer:
From Germantown Academy, in Philadelphia:
From St. Paul’s School, in Concord, N.H., which at one point had the highest endowment per pupil of any school in the world, secondary or university-level; it currently has over $600 million for a student body of about 535:
St. Paul’s School students and teachers work in collaboration — in discussion around Harkness tables, in state-of-the-art laboratories and in the living laboratory of our School grounds to investigate new and age-old questions through courses in the humanities, mathematics, sciences, languages, and the arts. You and your peers won’t just acquire knowledge here — you’ll build it together.
Milton Academy, outside Boston, is alma mater of T.S. Eliot, Bobby Kennedy, and, best of all, Jenny Slate. On its website, there is a page called “Six Favorite Milton Traditions.” Number one is a table:
The Ransom Everglades School, in Miami, brags that its Harkness-style pedagogy predated actual Harkness tables:
Three decades before Harkness tables arrived at Exeter, Paul Ransom instructed students in the Pagoda through the close readings of texts … Student-centered, discussion-based learning built on a pedagogy of inquiry still characterizes Ransom Everglades, whether around tables where literature and historical texts are analyzed or in computer and physics labs where students define problems and create solutions.
The table must be reckoned with. Even schools lacking the table legacy must contend with the table legacy.
But lest you think that just any oval table is a Harkness table, there is a company that makes the official Harkness table. Meet Huston & Co., of Kennebunkport, Maine, which holds the trademark to the Harkness table.
On Huston & Co.’s website, we learn:
The Huston & Company Harkness Tables™ are built according to the original 90-year old copyrighted and patented design, developed by philanthropist Edward Harkness for Phillips Exeter Academy. The standard size of the traditional oval Harkness Table is 7’ wide and 11’ long, seating twelve students and one teacher, with longer versions available for more students. This oval form creates a collaborative style of learning, inspired by the Socratic method, known in many classrooms today as the Harkness Learning Method. In engaging with their classmates around a signature Harkness Table™, students are encouraged to listen to the ideas and thoughts of their peers and in turn, they develop the ability to articulate their own opinions.
By the way, nowhere on the website can one find the price of the Harkness Table™, which I take to mean that the table costs more than I’ve spent on all furniture, ever—and I have five children, most of whom have their own bed.
Huston & Co.’s claim, that the table implies and supports a particular teaching method, runs throughout pro-Harkness literature. The method is, as far as I can tell, discussion-based teaching rather than simply lecturing. For a good example of the rhetoric, see this piece on the website of the National Association of Independent Schools, the major organization for private schools. The author, a teacher who loves using the “Harkness method,” writes, in part:
International affairs expert Fareed Zakaria has recently suggested that America’s edge in education comes from its habit of making students think rather than just memorize and regurgitate. Discussion-based teaching (also called the “Harkness method,” after the oval discussion tables designed to facilitate conversation) challenges students to sit at the center of education, making meaning of new information together, talking, listening, and ultimately thinking … [O]nce included in a curriculum it allows students to more deeply understand material and think for themselves.
The assumption is that discussion-based teaching was literally invented by jabillionaire Edward Harkness, whose father was an original investor in Rockefeller’s Standard Oil; Harkness then spread his innovative teaching methods through the table he designed and donated to Exeter, Yale, and other elite institutions. Socrates? John Dewey? Mere pishers when placed next to Edward Harkness.
There is a lot going on here: Exeter, which is as prestigious as any high school in the world, had the table first, so other schools want to lay claim to it. Every school everywhere now brags about its “progressive” education model, and having this table is a tangible way to show it—one might say a marketing gimmick. The tables are really gosh darned nice. They are made of wood, which as we know signals virtue (hence upper-class parents’ absurd fixation on Melissa & Doug toys, a love that has always struck me as kin to the Waldorf cult of natural materials). And prep schools have become more similar over the years, all chasing a shrinking pool of families willing to spend on private education; there is a rush to follow the crowd, rather than to stand out. And the crowd has decided it’s all about this table.
Well, not just the table. Keep reading at the Huston & Co. website, and you get this:
In addition to building the Harkness Table™, Huston & Company also partners with Eustis Chair to provide the Harkness Chairs to accompany the tables.
I’ve done some extensive research into this, and it turns out that while the tables make you smarter, the chairs make you taller and better looking.
Mea culpa, Olive Garden
In my post yesterday, I offered my master theory of Friendly’s, which has something to do with its being a family restaurant that does not serve alcohol. I asked, somewhat rhetorically, who else does that? And I offered up the Olive Garden. A shrewd reader, one learned in the ways of American casual dining, pushed back:
From OG's website: Olive Garden's wine program has won several awards of its own, including “America's Best Casual Dining Wine List” by the Monterey Wine Festival and the best wine program among the top 10 casual dining restaurants by the Wall Street Journal.
I besmirched the oenological rep of Olive Garden, hereafter “the OG.” Never again, I say. Never again.
Keep the mail coming! Write to me at markoppenheimer@substack.com.