<p>I find all of this to be infinitely depressing, but not surprising, not any more than any of the other child sexual abuse stories that come out. Especially since I was a student there once upon a time, and remember the specific teacher who’s the subject of the New Yorker article quite well. (I deliberately avoided taking any of his classes; he always seemed deeply creepy to me, and I was never a fan of teachers who did the “cult of personality” thing.)</p>
<p>I hadn’t read all the details before but the NBC drama Law and Order SVU did a “ripped from the headlines” on this last night with most of the facts essentially the same…</p>
<p>However, at the same time, I understand the people who say it didn’t seem that remarkable at the time.</p>
<p>In my high school in the late 1970’s, there were several nominally consensual student-teacher relationships. Some of them were out in the open when the student was still a student, others were more or less open secrets until the student graduated and then ceased to be at all secret. We had a teacher who left his wife (who’d been his student at a previous school) for another student, a teacher who left her husband to follow a student to college, etc. It was not even considered scandalous.</p>
<p>I can see that many of the incidents at Horace Mann were more of a coercive and abusive nature.</p>
<p>I find it very hard to believe that a relationship between a high-school-age student and a teacher at least 10 years (many times many more years) older could be anything but coercive. To say nothing of the inherent conflict between the teacher-student relationship and the relationship between lovers and/or between sex partners.</p>
<p>One of the my mothers bridesmaids married the high school football coach.
Yes they dated apparently when she was in high school and married when she was in college. The coach recently died and he stayed at the school for decades.
But eww.</p>
<p>I should probably add that I wasn’t subjected to any sexual abuse myself, except when I was 11, by my 7th-grade English teacher, but he abused almost everyone in my class – calling up one child each day to the front of the classroom to be hugged and fondled for most of the class, while he continued to teach. And he had already been there for almost 30 years by the time I started. (I was, in fact, being sexually abused during most of the years I was there, but it was by an authority figure outside the school, and had nothing to do with the place.)</p>
<p>However, none of these stories about the sexual abuse there seem to take into account all the unchecked non-sexual, verbal and psychological (and sometimes physical) abuse that some teachers engaged in, and, of course, the pervasive physical abuse and general bullying inflicted by students on other students, at least during my first few years there. As to those, especially the latter, I was quite familiar. (Most people in college didn’t even believe the stories I would tell about the things that used to happen; it sounded like something out of Tom Brown’s Schooldays.)</p>
<p>Other than all of that, it was a wonderful school, of course – I learned a lot!</p>
We are in “other than that Mrs. Lincoln, how did you like the play” territory here!</p>
<p>My feeling is that an all-male school (which Horace Mann was during the time of these abuses) with a male faculty is an inherent breeding ground for abuse. I doubt Horace Mann was the only boys prep school where this sort of thing went on.</p>
<p>Given the rest of your comment, I suppose I should clarify that yes, Horace Mann was (theoretically!)* an all-boys’ school when I attended; the first girls who openly identified as such didn’t enter 7th grade until a few years after I graduated. That was an extremely difficult situation for me to be in all those years, given that I was well aware of my gender issues long before I started there – and I sometimes wonder if others may have sensed them as well, as carefully as I tried to hide them, given that epithets such as “girl” were among those I often had thrown at me, both when I was being forced to “run the gauntlet” and otherwise – but it isn’t particularly relevant to this story.</p>
<p>I should also point out that the sexual abuses continued to at least some extent after the school became co-educational, and that some of the victims who’ve come forward are female. There were a very small number of women who were teachers when I was there – maybe two? three? – but certainly not enough to affect the atmosphere in any way.</p>
<p>I know you’re right that Horace Mann wasn’t the only place where this went on, but the only one I’ve heard about where the specifically sexual abuse seems to have happened on anything resembling the same scale, for the same length of time, is Poly Prep.</p>
<p>Donna</p>
<p>*The only other trans woman I know of who went to the school was Renee Richards, who graduated 20 years or so before I did. That we both also went to the same college is, of course, a coincidence, since I don’t think I ever heard of her until I was in law school.</p>