Hyde School Survivors

Reader response/Letters to the Editor, Maine Times 1992 Joe Gauld still loose? I was interested to read Diane L Potter’s letter . I hadn’t seen the article she was referring to and was very surprised to find that Joe Gauld is not in an institution. As the father of a student at Hyde School in the mid-80s, I have an insider’s perspective. Ms. Potter’s letter covers some very valid points but she doesn’t know the half of it!  When my wife first checked out Hyde school Timothy Wilson was in charge but when we brought our daughter there to start school Mr. Wilson was gone and Joe Gauld was in full charge. What a difference! Joe claims the school is not for kids with behavior problems, yet most of the students I’ve seen were there in a desperation situation. The next step for most of them was either running away from home or reform school or jail. That is the only reason the parents and students put up with what they did. One of Joe’s fun little games is what he calls a “Family Learning...

Maine Times Analysis: Is Joe Gauld's educational philosophy what the world needs? Remember some years ago a movement called Buchmanism: a lot of people getting together in a room and confessing their sins of omission and commission - a kind of alcoholics anonymous on a grape juice jag? The whole thing got retitled Moral Rearmament (MRA) and a tennis player named Bunny Austin made headlines by advocating world changing through life changing, the slogan of Frank Buchman himself. Well, something of this kind is now used as part of a system of growth through courage which has been put together by a man named Joe Gauld, headmaster of the Hyde School in Bath, an institution not primarily interested in studies but in a system which Gauld says builds character and develops each student's "unique potential." Gauld, according to his own account, began Hyde School with students who had very little academic talent and many behavioral problems. At that time he introduced a series ...

Strong pushback from a parent when Hyde School tried to take over Gardiner Area High School in 1992: _____ Letter to the editor, Maine Times 1992-08-14 : It's time that I speak out about my reservations on the Gardiner-Hyde Project at Gardiner High School. Like many parents, my husband and I were at first curious, then more interested as we heard some things that we would like to see happen at the high school, and finally completely turned off. Joe Gauld (the founder of the private Hyde School in Bath, who will implement his educational philosophy in the high school) is a manipulator par excellence. In large group meetings he deftly skirts around questions without completely answering them. I believe there is reason for our school board to look more closely into allegations of inappropriate and humiliating disciplines that have been made against the Hyde School in the past Last winter the school board hesitated on accepting the program at Gardiner on a trial basis until they receiv...

Maine Times - Joe Gauld Presents His Educational Philosophy to the World Original: https://archive.org/details/mt-02-aug-1974-1/ and here https://archive.org/details/sim_maine-times_1974-08-02_6_44/ Joe Gauld promotes Bath's Hyde School and its character development program with the zeal of a salesman who has just conceived a better mousetrap. He exudes an evangelical fervor in his nonstop effort to convince Maine's educational leaders that Hyde, a grades 9-12 prep school, is the new model for what education can, and should be. Gauld, the founder, headmaster and spiritual leader of Hyde, believes that building a young person's character to cope successfully with a tumultuous world is every school's primary calling. Preparing a student for college admission should be almost incidental. "Hyde School was founded on a conviction that education must promote among young people a realization of their own potentialities and a respect for themselves as individuals," G...

Maine Times - The Selling of Hyde Article link: https://archive.org/details/mt-16-jun-1978-1/ "Hyde is the model of a new education system. Keep that in mind and accept that it is so. Hyde is already effectively confronting segments of the present system of educating and raising kids in this country. Accept that fact. Hyde is presenting to families in America a vision of the type of relationships that should exist in families. Most of us accept this already." ON A COLD January night last winter, Joe Gauld, the ebullient, founder of Hyde School, invited to dinner a dozen or so Bath community leaders. He wanted to know what really had poured the city on Hyde, an experimental prop school whose towering goal is to emancipate the public school system. As it turned out, Gauld did most of the talking . . . and shouting and name-calling. Before the four-hour encounter was over; he mode a proposition to the group: school board members, representatives of the city Council and influenti...