Frank David Boynton

Principal High School From 1893

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Society's greatest need yesterday, to-day and forever, is the need of self-reliant men, men who do not lean on their fellows; who ask no favors of the world, though they may be ever ready to do them; who make opportunities instead of waiting for them; who face life with a calm confidence that is itself an earnest of success. The world has need of such men everywhere but nowhere more than at the head of her great public schools. Time was when we pictured the pedagogue as a book-worm and a recluse divorced from the practical interests of life and the better for that divorce, interested in political issues only when they had become historical, a man, in short, whose business it was to know rather than to be or to do. Now we have changed all that. The teacher is coming to be more and more the man of affairs, alert, active, conscious of the great educational forces that can never be imprisoned within the covers of books, and constantly manipulating them to mould not the minds only but the characters of this pupils.

Such men are rare. Doubtless, like poets, they are born, not made. So it was probably in the case of the subject of this sketch, yet training and circumstances have had their share also in developing those qualities that have fitted the man so admirably for his work. He was born in Potsdam, N.Y., during the troublous times of the Civil War. Two years later his parents moved to the country, where he spent his boyhood. This period was not a long one. He had barely entered his teens when the fire demon reduced his family to poverty and compelled him to face the necessity of self support.

The boy was thus obliged to pass at a bound from the carelessness of childhood to the responsibilities of manhood. With true Yankee versatility he turned his hand to whatever came in his way. At fourteen he was apprenticed to a brick mason. A year later he abandoned the trowel to go behind the counter of a country store. Another year and he had become a farm hand; and here he found his opportunity. The long toil of the summer was rewarded by the possibility of a winter of study; and at the end of three years of persistent effort he found himself in a position to enter the Potsdam Normal School, though not without conditions. Three terms of uninterrupted study followed, then another summer of farm work, then a year of teaching with the hope of a speedy return to the Normal; but that hope was doomed to disappointment. Family financial troubles consumed his salary and he found himself obliged to seek more remunerative, if less congenial employment with a manufacturing firm.

By the fall of 1885, however, he was able to resume his work at the Normal and to complete it without interruption, being graduated from the classical course in June, 1887. Not only had he been self-supporting during this period of preparation for college; he had also found himself sufficiently prosperous to venture upon matrimony, for in 1886 he had married Miss Flora WHITE of Nicholville, N.Y. In the fall of 1887 he entered Middlebury College and with characteristic energy immediately took a prominent place in the college life. He won the first Parker and the second Merrill prizes in declamation, was editor-in-chief of the college paper, president of the athletic association, speaker at the junior exhibition, and finally commencement speaker at his graduation in 1891, when he received the degree of A.B. Three years later Hamilton College honored him with a master's degree.

In the fall of 1891, Mr. BOYNTON entered upon his life work as an educator, as principal of the high school at Webster, N.Y., and this position he held until called to the principalship of the Ithaca High School in 1893. During this short incumbency at Webster occurred a phenomenon that Ithacans, in the light of their experience, will doubtless think characteristic of the man. So rapid was the increase in non-resident attendance that before Mr. Boynton's two years of service were completed, it had become necessary to build a large addition to the school.

Friends of the Ithaca High School have watched with growing interest the steadiness and rapidity with which, under Principal BOYNTON's leadership, it has pushed its way during the past seven years into the front rank of secondary educational institutions. The registration in the fall of 1893 was 419; in 1900 it is 650. Meantime the teaching force has been doubled. Here, as in Webster, the rapidly growing institution soon found itself in cramped quarters. Little by little was appropriated every available inch of space in the building; finally it became obvious that nothing but a new building or an extensive addition to the old one would meet the needs of the school, and the latter alternative was chosen.

But the school has not only become larger, it has become more active. New interests have awakened within it and have found expression through organizations of various kinds--musical, literary, athletic, political--which have in their turn reacted most beneficially upon the school by awakening among the students an active sense of loyalty to the institution. In the formation of all of these organizations the principal has played his part wisely, suggesting where he saw the need, advising when asked, controlling when necessary. Once of the most recent movements with which he has been associated and which owes its success principally to his untiring energy, was the movement to secure a public play ground for the children of the city schools.

Professor BOYNTON has not, however, devoted himself so narrowly to the interests of one school or one community as to lose touch with other and wider educational movements; In his own community he holds not only the principalship of the high school but also the directorship of the Conservatory of Music. Outside that community his interests are varied. Since 1895 the Academic Principals' Association has retained him as chairman of the committee on revision of the regents' academic syllabus. He is also chairman of the committee on courses of study for the secondary schools of New York State is a member of the National Herbart Society, and a member of the American Social Science Association. In addition to these activities he has found time to prepare a most successful text book on plane and solid geometry.

It is those who know Professor BOYNTON best and who have been most closely associated with him that realize most fully the extent of what he has accomplished. Endowed with a genius for organization, he has made his school in some respects a marvel. The work of the big institution moves with the smoothness and precision of the most perfect piece of mechanism; yet there is something better than mechanism here, there is perfectly organized intelligence. How labor has been lightened for teacher and pupil, how apparently impossible results have been attained, only those who have watched the evolution from within can fully understand. To the beholder from without the work looks perfect now. Those who share the principal's confidence know how far he is from thinking it so, how actively his busy brain is engaged with plans for its improvement; and every true friend of the school must join in the wish that no untoward accident may bring them to naught.

Thank you Mary Kreps for transcribing these records into digital format.

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