School in the Wilds : Far away from urban distractions, students hit the books and stoke the fires. They learn self-reliance.

Midland has long since realized that there is no clear difference between our needs and our wants. The former are few, and the latter many. In general, we try to get on without the latter. --Paul Squibb, founder, Midland School

By 7 a.m., the mercury in Dan Kunkle’s outdoor thermometer has barely shinnied up to 35 degrees. To cope with the cold, the headmaster of Midland School has spent the night under an extra layer of blankets.

A plucky freshman, Christy Kielpinski, has worn sweats to bed, her shoe-box-sized stove having lost its warmth. And veteran faculty wife Diana Russell has followed her own procedure--switching on an electric blanket to take the chill off the sheets, then tucking a hot-water bottle under the covers.

With a lifestyle that many urbanites might find woodsy--not to say masochistic--teachers and students at Midland adhere to a doctrine of Emersonian self-reliance that the Yankee individualist himself could not fault.

Housed in a cluster of hand-built wood cabins at the edge of the wilderness 40 miles north of Santa Barbara, Midlanders learn to separate needs from wants and discard the latter, as founder Paul Squibb advised.

One of only half a dozen boarding schools in the country where students work to maintain the facilities, Midland has its “preppies”--83 of whom are enrolled in the ninth through 12th grades--out tending the garden and chopping firewood.

In the pastoral rusticity of the Santa Ynez Valley, they warm themselves by wood-burning stoves, stoke ovens to heat their shower water and attend classes in unheated cabins.

It is a life in harmony with nature, combined with a full curriculum of academic courses, from Latin to calculus. Students, who score in the upper ranks of national secondary-school tests, often go on to Harvard, Stanford or the University of California.

Midland’s Depression-era practices of watchful consumption and less materialistic living, instituted at the school’s founding in 1932, have meanwhile become fashionable tenets of the ecologically au courant.

“It’s funny,” muses Kunkle. “In one way, the school is very old-fashioned--and in another, it’s incredibly current.”

On a chill, sun-sharpened day in early spring, the school resembles nothing so much as a bustling frontier community. Puffs of smoke unfurl from residence-cabin chimneys, and a neighbor’s cattle graze in pastures sprinkled with golden poppies. During an afternoon devoted to chores, students go about such duties as digging a ditch for a new septic tank, sweeping out classrooms and planting shrubs outside the old wood-framed ranch house that serves as the school’s main office building.

When he first laid eyes on the place two years ago, Kunkle, an Easterner, admits he gulped down his amazement. Academic dean at Mercersburg Academy in south-central Pennsylvania, the slender, soft-spoken administrator was accustomed to coats and ties and white-pillared academic halls.

Now, like the rest of the faculty and students, Kunkle, 41, wears jeans, a sweater and woolen socks--clothes that, according to the Midland dress code, are “warm and in good repair.”

In giving a campus tour, Kunkle also differs from most headmasters: He hops out of his Jeep to swing open hand-hewn pasture gates and, bumping along a rutted dirt road, points out the school’s assortment of horses and pigs, as well as the geology professor’s two llamas, which do pack-animal duty on hiking trips.

Pulling up to what looks like a jumbled dump, he announces matter-of-factly that this is “a place where we store a lot of stuff.” “Trash Canyon,” as the spot is dubbed, is a treasure trove of rusting propane tanks, wood planks from dismantled buildings, car tires and sundry--but certainly useful--parts of long-forgotten machinery.

“We’re sort of pack rats,” Kunkle explains disarmingly. “Thrifty.”

Frugality was, indeed, one of the cornerstone virtues on which Squibb established his school six decades ago. A graduate of strait-laced Kent School in Connecticut, Squibb believed in self-help and minimal facilities. Faculty and students built their cabins and classrooms on the ranch he and his wife, Louise, bought, and the founder quickly gained a reputation as an eccentric egalitarian.

Through the years, Midland’s spirit of independence has remained unchanged. Offers of donations for fancy swimming pools and gymnasiums have been steadfastly refused, and both the 1960s counterculture and the last decade’s egregious materialism were weathered with sober-mindedness.

Dee Hodge, 40, director of the emergency department at Children’s Hospital in Oakland, remembers the Black Panther manifesto being read at the school’s daily nondenominational chapel service and faculty leading students in political debates.

“But there was no one saying ‘down with the administration’ and walking out of campus,” he says. “Where were you going to walk to, the wilderness?”

In any era, proving their mettle day in and day out is not easy for teen-agers. “That’s the biggest thing that keeps people from coming here,” says 17-year-old Lena Shaputnic of Redding, one of the school’s two senior prefects, as she reflects on the absence of ordinary adolescent rituals.

According to Lena, students sometimes complain that “ ‘I just want a normal life. I want to have hot water in the morning. I want to be able to drive my car and have an ice cream cone.’ Those things aren’t available here.”

But students seem to agree that the Spartan school life is inextricably linked to building character and establishing their fledgling sense of adult independence. They say they come to Midland because they are disenchanted with the materialistic, fast-track world around them; they describe themselves as individualists, more at home in the outdoors than in the shopping malls.

Chris Jacob, who comes from a wealthy Seattle family, says he recognizes that he was overly pampered. “I was 17,” he says, “and I had never done anything with my life at all. I figured if I came here, it would give me a rude awakening as to what I had coming.”

The faculty is aware of the relative hardships on youth. Carlos Ortiz, who has been at the school for 20 years as chemistry and physics teacher, chief plumber and baseball coach, stops his tractor on the way to mow the athletic field to talk about the school environment.

“It’s pretty cold and pretty wet and pretty harsh,” he says. “But once (students) come through here, they always talk about how they braved it. Compared to this place, anything else is really easy--anywhere they go, anywhere they live.”

A typical day at Midland usually seems filled with vigor rather than groans or regrets. Awakened at 6:45 a.m. by a clanging cast-iron bell, students attend four or five classes, put in an average of 20 minutes of chores and participate in sports ranging from soccer to cross-country running.

They break in the morning for fruit and in the afternoon for milk and crackers, while teachers gather at the “faculty lounge,” an assemblage of rough wood benches situated around a tree stump, where coffee is served.

An assortment of dogs accompany their mistresses and masters to class, dozing as the teachers relate their lessons to campus phenomena. Explaining how the amount of pressure depends on the height of a column of water, Ortiz comments on the sluggish plumbing in parts of the schoolyard.

Sherman Herrick had his freshman science class out measuring the volume of water flowing in the school’s creek during spring flooding. Herrick has also turned an old spherical propane tank, set on casters, into a rotating globe to demonstrate spatial calculations related to the Earth.

A few improvements are slated for Midland: Solar panels will be tested to help heat some new girls’ dorms as well as some showers, and a recreation room with Ping-Pong tables is to be built. The administration offices have been spruced up with wood floors and throw rugs, and students are planting sage and coffee bushes out front.

But nothing too radical is in the wind. Passing suggestions of heating classes have met with characteristic Midland logic.

“Since they’re not insulated, a stove wouldn’t make a lot of difference,” Kunkle reports.

Besides, no one at Midland seems to want to spoil the simplicity that enriches the place.

“When I go back home, it’s weird,” says Christy, 14, already aware that she differs from her old friends in Santa Barbara. “They get driven two blocks down the street. I’m used to walking places here.”

Other testimonials go deeper. “(Midland) gave me the opportunity to get to know white people as people,” says LaVois Hooks, a 34-year-old black alumnus from Compton who went on to earn bachelor’s and master’s degrees from Stanford, becoming the first person in his family to complete college.

The lessons of confidence and self-reliance continue through life, alumni affirm.

Jenny Stine, a 28-year-old graduate from San Diego, says she is the household fix-it person, taking apart the stalled dishwasher and repairing the stereo and vacuum cleaner.

“It’s not just saving money,” she insists. “It really gives me pleasure to do these things.”

The pleasure remains strong over the years, as Van Kelsey, who started his own insurance company, attests, walking in from his yard in Bel-Air to talk about what he learned in Midland’s class of ’39.

Soon after he graduated, the country entered World War II, with young Kelsey serving stateside in naval transport. While other recruits--untrained in Squibb’s doctrine of needs and wants--had difficulty, he recalls, the cataclysmic war did not shake a Midlander’s confidence.

Says Kelsey with old school bravura: “I was able to cope with everything with equanimity.”