Porter Edward Sargent (1872-1951)

    After teaching at both Harvard and Browne and Nichols School (a Cambridge prep school), Porter founded Sargent's Travel School for Boys in 1904. During the next decade, he toured the world five times with his students. The Travel School proved to be a great success, with Mr. Sargent preparing hundreds of boys for college through their world learning experiences. The onset of World War I, however, led to the discontinuation of the Travel School.

    Evaluating potential students for his Travel School put Mr. Sargent into close contact with administrators at many exclusive private schools. His dealings with these schools helped him begin to form critical judgments on the educational system. Parents who had sought Mr. Sargent's advice on school placements for their sons continued to do so after the closing of the Travel School. His expertise in this arena led in 1915 to his next venture, publication of The Handbook of Private Schools.

    Mr. Sargent had intended to simply compile and edit the Handbook, then have it distributed by a commercial publisher with a significant marketing staff; however, publishers feared that lawsuits would result from Mr. Sargent's critical introductory passages, and they also found his formatting demands to be too expensive to undertake. Thus, Mr. Sargent was forced to become his own publisher, distributing his books directly by mail.

    Mr. Sargent took little time to establish a strong, unique voice in the Handbook. So-called vanity publishing—where length or quality of listing is determined by the purchase of advertising space—was never of interest to Mr. Sargent. Instead, schools were listed for free, enabling Mr. Sargent to appraise each school objectively and critically. The present-day publishing house honors Mr. Sargent's approach: Objectivity and rigorous attention to detail and the facts continue to distinguish all four educational reference books in The Porter Sargent Handbook Series from competing guide books.

    His annual critical introductions to the Handbook soon became required reading for members of the educational community. Many newspapers reviewed the Handbook each year due in large part to the controversial thoughts sure to be expressed by Mr. Sargent in his preface. During the early 1920s, Mr. Sargent became increasingly interested in the many experimental movements that were then in use in private and public education. He hoped that these small movements would eventually lead to a change in educational methods and alter the deliberate attempt he saw on the part of colleges to control rather than develop the minds of their students; too much emphasis, he felt, was placed on conformity, and not enough on individuality.

    By the 1930s, Mr. Sargent looked alarmingly toward Europe at what he considered to be the authoritarian political movements taking root there. He was fundamentally an idealist and one who despised the "stupidity and wastefulness" of war. He felt that leaders had misled and confused the public with misinformation, and he blamed a flawed educational system for not providing citizens with the tools to uncover the truth. In his efforts to improve education, Mr. Sargent made frequent appeals to public school educators to familiarize themselves with the state of affairs in the field of education, particularly at advanced levels.

    Due to his varied interests, Porter had a number of manuscripts simultaneously in progress during the final decade of his life. Many of these works expounded upon his strongly held political and social beliefs.

    Mr. Sargent died at the age of 78 on March 27, 1951.