School with Rule

At 7:30 one morning last week, 54 sober youngsters filed into the one classroom at Arizona Language School in Phoenix to end their longest vacation of the year--two weeks. Aged 3 1/2 to 9. they were soon too busy to mind the room's 95DEG heat. Until 5 in the afternoon, the kids were drilled relentlessly in reading, writing, arithmetic, music and calisthenics--taught mostly in foreign languages. So it goes at Arizona for 9 1/2 hours a day, five days a week, 48 weeks a year. "I teach them to concentrate," says hard-driving Founder Reese Fuller, 34. "Children can't get this kind of education anywhere else." A graduate of the University of California, Fuller speaks Russian, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Greek and Latin, and is now studying Sanskrit, "so I'll be ready when my pupils reach high school." His experience includes an Air Force tour as one of the Pentagon's Russian interpreters and a period of teaching languages in a California high school. In 1959 he launched his own school to combat his pet hate: permissive education.

Grace in Russian. Staffed by Fuller and two Ukrainian women teachers, Fuller's no-frill school charges only $50 a month. Obedient to his smallest wish, Fuller's kids start the day doing three-R lessons in Spanish, then shift to Russian, later to Greek, and finally English. In the one-room-schoolhouse tradition, the oldest help teach the youngest. Thus all proceed at their own pace. The smallest tot begins writing in script, assiduously copying such maxims as "Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty." Art and science are similar exercises in demonstration, not experiment. Instead of spontaneous sketching, the kids dutifully copy reproductions of the masters; Fuller shows scientific phenomena with a Sterno can and a toy physics kit. Fuller prepares lunch himself--usually canned soup, fruit, bread, butter and milk. The kids say grace in Russian, eat at their desks, and return their plates (scraped) to Fuller in the kitchen. If they stick to this Spartan routine through high school, Fuller is sure, colleges will shower them with "a multitude of scholarships." Exam for Parents. On Fuller's office walls are two pictures, both of Senator Barry Goldwater, who "typifies what this school stands for: individuality and self-responsibility." On Fuller's desk is Goldwater's The Conscience of a Conservative, from which Fuller fondly quotes: "We must recapture the lost art of learning." Fuller denounces John Dewey's edict that children can best be taught by getting them interested. He insists that children must be "led out of darkness" by a disciplined "Christian" approach to "reason," and all the students are either Roman Catholics or Protestants, about half from church-going families. Only two Jewish children have applied. Fuller rejected one because his parents "tried to tell me how I should teach." One fascinating Fuller wrinkle is a 44-question entrance exam--for parents, not children. Sample: "Do you believe it right that your child be spanked at school if he does wrong?" A "no" gets a fast rejection from Fuller, whose favorite cure for errants is whacking a child's outstretched palm with a ruler. Fuller's school is so besieged with applicants that he accepts only one out of ten. He now plans a new $100,000 school for 200 students. His current parents--doctors, lawyers, businessmen, two public-school teachers, a Democratic state representative--are all apparently delighted that Fuller is turning out four-year-olds who can read and write in three languages. Says Walter Ludwig. a mechanical engineer: "Children don't know what they want until they are 20, and they should be strongly guided."

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