Fordham Preparatory School - Ramkin Yearbook (Bronx, NY)

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FACULTY RAM ki THE hundredth anniversary of our inception, we the Faculty of Fordham Preparatory School, greet you. Many years have passed and much has been done since Archbishop Hughes instituted Fordham in 1811 with little more than a few lonely acres of ground and an unlimited trust in God as his assets. Since 1847, when the Kentucky Jesuits came to St. John's College (the present Fordham as you doubtless know) our identity has been merged with that of the Society of Jesus and we have closely followed the ideals and the methods of Ignatius. To speak here solely as the Faculty of the Prep is rather difficult, since before the separation of the Preparatory School from Fordham College about the time of the last war, the same teachers served them both. The educational system at Fordham. borrowed through Canada from the French Jesuits, was something like this. College was an eight-year affair, composed of Rudiments, Third, Second, and First Grammar and the higher classes of Class es Belles-Lettres, Rhetoric and Philosophy; of these the first four corresponded to the present preparatory course, but the entire eight grades were regarded as an integral unit. Thus, in the old days, a boy of eleven (for higher education began early in those days) was as much a student of St. John’s College as a young man of twenty-one. Our curriculum has remained fairly standardized throughout the decades, although many other drastic changes have been made. For one thing, Fordham Preparatory no longer has its military training as was the case a few decades ago, when the boys from the Preparatory Division marched proudly beside their elder College cousins in the vaunted Fordham Corps of Cadets. Then, too, we are now a day school and have lw en since the Great War. In the years berore, however, boarders comprised the majority of our students, the younger boys residing in St. John's Hall, while the older fellows lived in Hughes Hall (erected about 18901 and its early predecessor, a three-story brick edifice topped by a small clock-tower. For decades ours was the most important unit of Fordham and as late as 1915, the College roster read: 192 students in Fordham College, 72 in the short-lived Grammar School embracing the fifth to eighth grades, and 437 in the prep. Father Dolan was our first distinct Principal, and lie has been succeeded by Fathers Guenther, Bona, and Redmond. As Jesuit teachers, bred in the tradition of Ix yola and the “Ratio Studiorum”, formation rather than information has been our constant goal. We believe that education is something far more than a mere distribution of facts, that it is, in reality, a highly important period of life in which one's entire outlook, principles and ideals are formed. We believe that the purpose of true education is not to give an untrained mind a mass of these facts to do with whft it will, but rather to guide and build that mind to be a fervent member of the Church and a steadfast follower of the just state, as well. This, to our mind, will always constitute the perfect Christian, liberal edu- cation. For almost a hundred years at Fordham and four hundred throughout the world, we have had an abiding faith in it and we feel that the virtue and success of our students has forever proved us in the right.

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RAM REVEREND ROBERT I. CANNON. S.J. President