History
Maria H. (Bissell) Hotchkiss founded the school in 1891 to prepare young men for Yale University. The first day of instruction was October 18, 1892. Maria originally had aspirations for the school to serve underprivileged students, and the original charter provided some scholarships, and reserved space for academically gifted Lakeville boys (regardless of family income). Maria Hotchkiss was the widow of Benjamin B. Hotchkiss, who founded the French arms company Hotchkiss et Cie, made famous by the use of its machine guns in World War I . This led to a nickname for the school, "son of a gun".
The current Head of School is Malcolm McKenzie, former principal at Atlantic College in Wales. McKenzie is a Rhodes Scholar, with degrees from the Universities of Cape Town, Oxford and Lancaster.
Read more about this topic: Hotchkiss School
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“Let us not underrate the value of a fact; it will one day flower in a truth. It is astonishing how few facts of importance are added in a century to the natural history of any animal. The natural history of man himself is still being gradually written.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“We don’t know when our name came into being or how some distant ancestor acquired it. We don’t understand our name at all, we don’t know its history and yet we bear it with exalted fidelity, we merge with it, we like it, we are ridiculously proud of it as if we had thought it up ourselves in a moment of brilliant inspiration.”
—Milan Kundera (b. 1929)
“What you don’t understand is that it is possible to be an atheist, it is possible not to know if God exists or why He should, and yet to believe that man does not live in a state of nature but in history, and that history as we know it now began with Christ, it was founded by Him on the Gospels.”
—Boris Pasternak (1890–1960)