EXPECT A hot time in Tuscany-Canterbury this weekend.
The Calvert School -- a centerpiece of the North Baltimore community -- is celebrating its 100th birthday, and instead of partying at the Convention Center or a downtown hotel, the school rented the biggest tent it could find -- a 220-by-100-foot beauty from Loane Bros. It hired an orchestra and invited 1,000 guests to celebrate under the big top.
Virgil Mores Hillyer, Calvert's headmaster from 1899 to 1931, probably would have approved. It was he who said education should "introduce the new constantly, or the old with a new setting." Besides, Calvert always has done things differently -- not brashly, but differently. And cautiously.
Under Hillyer, Calvert resisted one educational fad after another. His four successors pulled the school through the Depression and into the 1990s without abandoning a traditional, basic, tightly prescribed curriculum, while resisting the temptation to add students and grades.
Even as Calvert entered into partnerships with two city public elementary schools, it did so with an almost fearful caution.
"It's not our mission to operate public schools," Merrill S. Hall III, the current headmaster, said the other day amid the bustle of preparation for the centennial. "We don't want our heads to be turned from our primary mission, which is right here. We think we've proved that our program will work in two public schools, though, and it's up to others to pick up that challenge."
Translation: The Calvert program has been evaluated and found successful at Barclay and Woodson schools in Baltimore. If the city wants to extend it to other schools, that's up to the city.
Meanwhile, Calvert moves along steadily with an educational program essentially unchanged for 10 decades, a miraculous feat in education -- an enterprise highly susceptible to fads.
"First, we are an elementary school," said Hall. "We've never tried to be anything else. We know our capacity, and our culture and style aren't trying to copy someone else."
Calvert's Tuscany Road home school, with 391 students, is indeed small, but if the 15,000 students in the school's home-study courses worldwide are added, Calvert becomes the planet's largest elementary school. More than 300,000 students, many at military or diplomatic posts or in isolated homes in every country of the world, have completed studies in the Home Instruction Department, founded by Hillyer with six children in 1906.
