When the time came in 1901 for the town to replace Naugatuck's aging high school, the design was again given to the architectural firm of McKim, Mead & White, and an appropriately lofty site was chosen further up the hill and with a more commanding view over the Green below. It would open in 1905. By then MM&W had designed many of the buildings that give the Green its character. They were the preferred architects of railroad president and industrialist John Howard Whittemore who, advocating “City Beautiful,” had, over many years, paid to make Naugatuck a showplace of the movement.
The high school MM&W designed on the hillside site is nothing, if not disciplined — a granite, marble and brick, Ionic, 3-story Classical temple, restrained from any hint of wayward Beaux Arts eclecticism. It is a buff-colored temple fit for Athena and for the education of Naugatuck’s next generation. Carved above the marble of the entablature is a cartouche quoting Charles William Eliot, “The fruit of liberal education is not learning but the capacity and desire to learn — not knowledge but power.” It’s probably safe to assume Whittemore had considerable say in that choice.
Charles William Eliot was president of Harvard through the transformational years 1869 to 1909 and was a leader bringing profound reforms to American education at all levels. He raised public school graduation standards and broadened high school curricula to include teaching of the sciences and of foreign languages. Eliot served as president of the National Education Association and on a ten member national commission whose 1893 report influenced schools and school boards everywhere, beginning reforms leading to the creation of the first “junior high schools.”
“…not knowledge but power.” I’m still wondering exactly how to understand that.
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