Every student spends one afternoon a week on Community Activities, doing volunteer service in Watertown or Cambridge. Tutoring, teaching modern dance, and special work projects on the school grounds show a desire to "be careful not to isolate a person from the vaster community outside of the school," as one student wrote in the yearbook, explaining this facet of school work.

Ryerson is very wary of what he calls the "preciousness and snobbishness" of private school education. He seems to see such volunteer projects as a partial antidote to the inbred community characteristic of experimental private schools.

There are many different kinds of discussion groups. All of Palfry school seems to be a spontaneous discussion group, slightly self-conscious, always taking itself very seriously.

Whatever the method, "communication" has become the password at Palfrey. To this end the whole school, all 55 members, meets together several times a week for special community discussions and assemlbies.

Smoke in a Pure Community

Last week the discussions centered around the question of smoking. The question, which seemed to intrude rather rudely on this pure little community, reared its head because faculty members could smoke on the school grounds while students were not allowed to.

True to the Palfry style, the school divided up into small groups to discuss smoking and the question of "maturity and immaturity" among the students as a correlative. Also true to Palfry style was the faculty's concern over the students' decision to meet separately from the faculty. The faculty feared that the rapport between students and faculty might be breaking down.

But the students were perfectly frank as they reported on their discussions. The two points they brought up in connection with the debate on smoking underlined the main concerns with the school of both students and faculty. The first is a concern over the relative quality of students and faculty. The second is a desire to keep the school united, in this case by not separating the smokers from the non-smokers.

The questions over this issue pinpointed very clearly though unintentionally the important problems of the school and of its liberal philosophy.

"If this is a moral question, then there should be no difference in smoking rules between us and the faculty," said one student. "Whatever problems the faculty had when they made their decision must be the same ones we are having now."

"But the faculty are adults," Mr. Ryerson injected.

"Aha," was the lone response.

The Obvious is a Matter of Controversy

Anywhere else an obvious statement of this kind would arouse no controversy. Yet at Palfry the division between students and faculty is intentionally de-polarized and sometimes risks being obscured.

"You are not ready to be teachers yet," the political history teacher, Richard Mandel, commented tersely. Yet this too is not as obvious a statement as it would seem. For in many senses the students are teachers and they are conscious of this.