Training for Brains

In deepest Bronx stands a six-story accretion of bile-colored brick, too ugly to be a mental hospital or a tannery. It is the Bronx High School of Science, and it is a nationally famed rookery for genius. The median IQ of its students is about 135, but in some classes the average runs to 145 or more. If training brains is what high schools are for, the Bronx school may be the best in the country; in 1956 and 1957, students at "Science" won a total of eleven National Merit Scholarships, more than any other high school in the U.S. This week, when the new batch of National Merit Scholarship awards was announced, the school had seven winners, again led the nation.

The Bronx brick pile is the embodiment of a theory, much argued by educators, that, like the slow-witted and the physically handicapped, bright students should be cut from the herd and schooled separately. It is one of four public high schools in New York City* permitted to accept or reject potential students on the basis of academic ability.

Science is harder to get into than most colleges; last summer 3,900 of New York City's brightest students applied, and only 750 were accepted. Occasionally, critics complain that such selectivity is undemocratic; others, notably onetime Harvard President James B. Conant, who is engaged in an intensive study of U.S. high schools, argue that modern comprehensive high schools can provide the varied training needed by all kinds of students, bright ones included.

The Key. A convincing partisan of the Bronx High School of Science is its principal, Alexander Taffel, 47, who took over the job this year when widely known Former Principal Morris Meister became president of the new Bronx Community College. Says Taffel, onetime gifted student at Townsend Harris, a high school shut down by New York City in 1942 in a wave of economy and possible equalitarianism: "We do a better job than comprehensive schools do in their honors courses. The teacher is the key; in our school the teacher doesn't have his courses divided so that he has to spend time with slower pupils. He's free to try new things. He can stimulate and become as stimulated as his students; if he's wise, he grows with them." Says one stimulated teacher: "It's a privilege to be here; it's constantly exhilarating. The problem is that so many of the kids are brighter than we are. We know darned well our IQs don't match most of theirs."

For science-minded teenagers, the elite high school has another justification. Explains Taffel: "Many Nobel Prizewinners do their outstanding work in their early 30s. There's so much to learn that you have to do it early or you won't arrive at the frontiers of research in time. You can't specialize narrowly any more; biology flows into biochemistry and on into mathematics." Jerome Metzner, chairman of the school's biology department, agrees: "When you get a bright youngster and focus his interest early, the kid soars like a comet. He gets a five-to ten-year start in professional life."

Required courses for four years at Bronx High are impressive: three years of math (most students take more); five years of the sciences; four years of English, four of social studies, and at least three years of Latin, Spanish, French, German or Hebrew. For students who are superior even at Bronx High, there are sterner courses in English, math and physics, biology and chemistry, leading to college admission with advanced standing. So far the students have taken everything thrown at them; last fall a tenth-grade biology class was fed a hard, one-year biology course in one semester, and at the end, most of the experimental group rated above 95 on a New York State Regents exam. This semester, class members are doing independent research, prowling into such arcane matters as an attempt to find whether frog blood can be grouped in types, as human blood can.

Calculus for Kicks. Bronx High's 2,600 students--a third of them girls--are unashamedly unaverage; some take sly amusement in explaining to visitors that they read advanced calculus for kicks, in their spare time, and many of them are precociously sure where they are heading, e.g., "Harvard for a doctorate, then teach math." Marriage waylays most girls heading for graduate school, but a survey of both sexes a few years ago showed that 13% of the school's alumni had taken two or more years of graduate study. Not all Bronx High students go into science; Principal Taffel maintains that those who do not are better grounded in what he pointedly calls "the other humanities" than graduates of most comprehensive high schools.

Not all is calculus and calorimeters at Taffel's school; he recalls that he has attended four school dances since he took over in February, and last week tryouts began on a student-written play. There is no football team at Science (too expensive), but last year the school won the city tennis championship, in 1956 won the city mile relay and handball titles. Another sporting championship it picked off last year: the Interscholastic Mathematics Contest title.

Next year Bronx High will leave its dirty yellow brick pile (Former Principal Meister will move in with his newly founded Bronx Community College) and take over a lavish, $8,000,000 brain trainery, equipped with special labs for independent student research. Last week the joyous grind for next year's scholarships continued; Math Department Chairman Irving Dodes dismissed a class studying symbolic logic, said wearily and wonderingly: "I can't sit down without kids coming in, pestering me for advanced math books or trying to prove the impossible. It's a continual effort to keep up. Every day I go home tired--but happy."

*The others, and this year's records: Brooklyn Technical High School, one Merit Scholarship winner; the High School of Music and Art, one winner; Stuyvesant High School, six winners--tied for second place nationally with Evanston (Ill.) Township High School.

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