Stanley Bosworth, RIP

The NY Times reports:

Stanley Bosworth, a self-described “old wizard” who shaped his own Hogwarts in Brooklyn in the form of Saint Ann’s School, which rapidly gained national prominence for its free-form approach to education and its success in sending graduates to top colleges, died on Sunday at his home in Brooklyn. He was 83....

As the founding headmaster of Saint Ann’s, Mr. Bosworth envisioned an academically rigorous school for the gifted, from pre-school through high school, with no grades and few rules. Along with standard courses like Shakespeare and Chinese, there are puppetry classes. For years, the school had a smoking lounge for students. Its own literature calls the place an “amusement park” whose attractions were Aristophanes, Darwin and Baudelaire. ...

Mr. Bosworth was selected to head the school when St. Ann’s Episcopal Church in Brooklyn Heights started it in 1965 as a way to attract parishioners. He created an admissions process using intelligence tests and based partly on the administrators’ intuition. He acquired a building at 129 Pierrepont Street, started a preschool, made the school independent from the church in 1982 and engendered what the school hails as “creative chaos.” He made it a practice to fly out of state to personally deliver students’ portfolios to colleges.

Mr. Bosworth’s expansive, scampish personality was stamped everywhere, so much so that it was common to speak of a cult of personality at the school. He called his preschoolers “funny, wooly creatures,” and predicted that Saint Ann’s would produce 10 percent of America’s poets.

He will be remembered and missed.