The Rector of Justin by Louis Auchincloss
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

The American prep school experience is the subject of Louis Auchincloss’s 1965 novel The Rector of Justin. The eponymous rector founds a school to produce an end product of comprehensible human import: young men of character who understand certain values like responsibility, discernment, and integrity. He fails utterly because, well, times were changing. The emerging corporate world did not need character, it needed high expectations which can be ’sold’ as valuable in themselves to others in order to both motivate and enrich. Auchincloss knew that the world he had been brought up in was dying. And he saw the implications for the future, not just for education but for what we casually call civilisation.

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