Able-Minded Seamen

For his salty criticism of U.S. schools, Admiral Hyman G. Rickover is often dismissed by professional educators as an out-of-his-depth amateur. In fact, Rickover is a seasoned schoolmaster running one of the most efficient school systems in the U.S.: the Navy's little-known Nuclear Power Schools at New London, Conn., and Mare Island, Calif.

Rickover launched them in 1956 and 1958 because he considered the products of U.S. schools illiterate in science and unfit for nuclear sailing. In his own 24-week schools, which already have 2,000 alumni, Rickover hurls college courses at enlisted men and graduate courses at officers with an intensity that is probably unmatched anywhere else.

Fat-Free Diet. The schools' function is to train the men entrusted with the power plants aboard nuclear subs and ships--about half the crew on a sub--and the training is aimed strictly at making sailors think. ("Hardware" courses come later at land-based nuclear plants.) The curriculum is a fat-free diet of pure math, physics, chemistry, electronics, engineering and health physics (to guard against radiation) that goes on for seven 50-minute periods a day, plus an average of four hours of homework done in a tiny, distraction-free cell. Teachers are on duty for help around the clock, and Rickover himself often conducts a final oral exam.

Last month 500 more students entered the schools after rigorous selection and anguished boning up on calculus. Rickover personally screens every officer who enters, grills every enlisted man who flunks to find out why. He checks the courses and picks the teachers, many of them former college professors now happily authorized to toss erasers at window gazers--if any.

Distractions are banned. A freshman must settle his money problems before arrival, and Navy rituals, such as marching and swabbing, are cut out. At Mare Island, the base commander gingerly treats Rickover's school like a well-armed island owned by a foreign power.

A $20,000 Education. Though they may have entered the Navy with a sketchy scientific schooling, Rickover's recruits soar in his rarefied atmosphere. "I had the best math teachers in the world," gloats one sailor. "It's like getting a $20,000 education," says another. The most impressive result is a new willingness to keep studying after graduation. On the Polaris sub George Washington, for example, sailors will soon attend classes in everything from calculus to computers, recently took a Harvard extension course using kinescoped TV lectures by Historian Crane Brinton.

Just to make sure the studying takes, Rickover requires requalification tests aboard ship. A man has to study to keep his rating, study harder to get ahead. This produces an odd personnel problem: a steady drain on savvy chief petty officers as they get commissions. Compared with the Navy as a whole, 30 times more Rickover sailors become officers. "You lose 20% of your people," growled one sub commander last week as he stared at a couple of CPOs hunched over books as well as black coffee. That fails to daunt "the admiral," as he is called without further identification. Says Rickover: "The main thing is that the men have been taught to think. It just shows what we can do with all our youngsters if we try."

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