Atom Bomb School

On the high New Mexico mesa where the town of Los Alamos now stands, there was once a school for boys. In 1942 the U.S. Army bought Los Alamos Ranch School, folded it up and asked the alumni not to mention its name. Then they began to build the town that built the atom bomb.

The wives of the atomic scientists did not know what their husbands were doing, but they did know that there was no school in Los Alamos for their kids. So they hired themselves as teachers and started a one-room school in a log cabin left over from the old Ranch School. Because the name Los Alamos was taboo, they called it the "One-Armed School" (after the one-armed chairs in which the children sat).

I.Q. 150. When Los Alamos grew bigger, it called in an outside educator as superintendent of schools. He figured that the brilliant scientists of Los Alamos must have brilliant offspring--probably an average I.Q. of 150. His school consequently emphasized college preparation for all, leaned hard on "oldfashioned" studies that discipline the mind.

But his curriculum was too tough for many of the boys & girls, whose tested I.Q. averaged only 100. (The local gag was that anybody who couldn't make the grade in school could always get a job at the Los Alamos labs that paid more than teacher got.) And as Los Alamos expanded, more & more schoolkids were the children of maintenance men, carpenters, shopkeepers and other nonscientists, who wanted more vocational courses and a more "progressive" education.

Pastel Thinking. Last year Los Alamos got a new superintendent, F. Robert Wegner, who gave it to them with bells on. Puckish Bob Wegner, 49, a man with shock-white hair and a youthful spirit, had once started a near-rebellion in Roslyn, Long Island, when he set his students to baking nut bread to teach them arithmetic (TIME, March 21, 1938). He went to Los Alamos from the Navy, where, as a lieutenant commander, he had bossed radio and rocket schools.

The first thing Bob Wegner did was to repaint the drab classrooms green, blue and yellow, because he said the soft pastels helped students to think better. Wegner also added music, art, commercial courses, home economics and industrial arts to the study program, introduced self-government in the classrooms. At Los Alamos, teacher and students sit in a semicircle, with one of the students acting as "chairman" of the classroom discussion (it's less autocratic, Wegner says, than to have the teacher out in front "dictating" to his class).

Superintendent Wegner also "clubbed" (i.e., combined) such courses as English and social sciences in 100-minute periods, teaching both at the same time. Last week the class held a miniature Moscow conference, with boys & girls acting as foreign ministers and arguing the case of each country.

No Juice. Superintendent Wegner was stumped for a while when he tried to equip his science courses. Though it was next door to the world's most fabulous science labs, Los Alamos School could not get any laboratory equipment. Says Wegner: "It was like not being able to buy orange juice in Tampa."

By last week there were 600 children in Los Alamos School, and enrollment was increasing every day. None of Los Alamos' boys & girls has to worry about New Mexico's educational standards, because Los Alamos School is responsible only to the town Board of Education and the Atomic Energy Commission. Any student who wants to go to college just asks Wegner for a recommendation; the colleges seem to take his word. Says Superintendent Wegner, with a twinkle: "The school at this point does not have a long history of successful graduates to offer colleges, but on the other hand it has no history of unsuccessful graduates."

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