We competed so keenly that when the school stopped ranking us some industrious students set up a table in the cafeteria where classmates could report their grades. There were about a hundred boys in each class, and, with notable exceptions, we loved the place. The teachers devoted their lives to us-they were with us from eight-forty in the morning until seven at night, drove us to school each day, took us on vacation trips.

But we still called our teachers “Sir,” and they called us “Mr.” Horace Mann was, in the way that prestigious schools often are, something of a benevolent cult. Jacket and tie were no longer mandatory, hair could be as long as we dared, and seventh and eighth graders were no longer known as first and second formers. My class, the Class of 1976, was the last to exclude girls, and, inside the ivy-covered stone and brick buildings, the social upheavals of the seventies were wearing away some of Horace Mann’s British-boarding-school trappings. There was a history instructor who, in a lecture on how the difficulty of delivering mail in the early days of the republic helped shape Federalist ideas, would drop his trousers to reveal patterned boxer shorts. There was an English teacher who slipped precepts from the Tao Te Ching into his classes on the Bible and occasionally urged us to subvert standardized tests by answering every question with the word “five.” There was a much loved language teacher who would pelt distracted students with a SuperBall.

When I was in high school, at Horace Mann, in the Bronx, in the nineteen-seventies, everyone took pride in the brilliant eccentricity of our teachers. “There was so much desire to please.” Illustration by Owen Freeman / Photograph by Seth Neubardt Robert Berman’s English class was a “cult of personality,” one student said.

Horacemann firstclass