Parent-Teacher Dissociation

The case before Magistrate A. C. Reeves Hicks of West Windsor Township, N.J., this week goes to the heart of a painfully balanced question of the individual v. society: Are parents entitled to shun public schools and do their own teaching?

Princeton Research Chemist Daniel S. Trifan, 43, and his wife face one year in jail for home-teaching their three children, whose tested IQs are in the genius range of 150-160. According to the West Windsor Township school board, they have broken the New Jersey law that requires all children to attend school or "receive an equivalent instruction elsewhere." Though the Trifans use Baltimore's famed Calvert School (tuition: $85 yearly), which gives lessons by mail to thousands of overseas and shut-in children, School Superintendent Francis Walton interprets the law to require "a classroom education." Children, says he, should "learn from each other in a group situation."

Moon Maps & Russian. "We started when they were still babies," recalls Mrs. Trifan. "They each knew the alphabet by their second birthday--it was sort of a birthday present." At three, each of the children could read. At six, each had passed third-grade subjects. Richard, 7, is now in Calvert's fifth grade, Daniel, 9, is in the seventh, and Marioara, 11, completed the eighth last June. This puts them three grades ahead of their ages.

The family lives on Trifan's $9,000 a year in a modest, one-story house filled with educational devices from moon maps, Russian grammars and model dinosaur skeletons to two pianos, including one in a backyard practice cabin. Music is the Trifan passion. Pianist Marioara commutes three times weekly to Philadelphia's noted Curtis Institute, where she is the youngest student. The children practice for three hours in the morning, do school-work until 4 in the afternoon, then get one hour of play.

They Talk Good. The Trifan kids are different from other kids "who don", like Shakespeare," as Marioara put it one afternoon last week. She had just been reciting Richard III from memory but Henry IV's Falstaff is her favorite character because "he's an exaggerator." Her little brother Richard idly remarked that the sun shining on the roof generated the same heat as 140 tons of soft coal. "Bi tuminous or lignite?" countered Brother David. Richard changed the subject to an 1865 coin that his mother owns. When Daniel recalled 1865 as the year of Jean Sibelius' birth. "They talk awfully good," says their neighbor Susan Rule, 8. "But they're just not hep." A neighborhood mother marvels at Mrs. Trifan, says: "I'm glad to get my kids out of the house."

Had Marioara not needed approval from the Princeton high school last fall to go on from Calvert's eighth grade to a high school correspondence course, the Trifans might never have been in court. The school board was incensed to discover that the family had two other children at home, insisted that "the laws are binding." Harvard-trained Chemist Trifan, who says he cannot afford a regular private school, is equally incensed. "They seem not to care that in public school the children would have to drop back academically Trifans' two or lawyer three argues years," he says. The Trifans' lawyer argues that the issue is basically the proper education of gifted children--"the greatest dilemma facing the schools in the country today, with the possible exception of segregation."

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