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"The first difficulty was Philip," recalls Pamela Hansford Johnson, wife of British Novelist C. P. Snow, and herself a noted novelist (The Unspeakable Skipton). Their son Philip was eight last fall when the Snows taught at the University of California's Berkeley campus; they had to find a school for him, and "he would have hated to cool his heels in an ordinary American school." What she delightedly found, reported Novelist Johnson, was "a very odd school indeed." It was San Rafael's booming 3R school, and odd was the word. How can a school that uses the antique McGuffey Readers be booming in 1961?

Thriving on dissatisfaction with public schools, 3R bans every possible "frill"-dances, student government, fund drives, P.T.A., and all athletics except for daily calisthenics. For a tuition of $900 a year, it offers old-fashioned work, using McGuffey and Noah Webster's 1783 Bluebook Speller (last revised in 1906). The only concession to modernity is grouping by ability in each subject, not by grades, so students can whiz through faster. Every 3R kindergartener writes and understands numbers up to 25, and some to 100. They begin reading at 4 1/2. And it's all done without student geniuses: the top IQ is 130 (and the lowest 90).

Learn Now, Adjust Later. Begun three years ago, 3R has grown from 28 pupils to 335 in its Spartan, unpainted, concrete, one-story building north of San Francisco. Flooded with applications, it already has a new branch in Calistoga. plans another in Santa Rosa. Within seven years it expects to have 15 schools in the Bay area, is even mulling over the idea of a 3R chain of schools across the country, like motels.

Founder of 3R is rumpled, rugged James W. Kirchanski, 41, who looks and sometimes roars like the combat paratrooper he was in World War II. "I eat, sleep and breathe the idea of trying to develop a literate public," says Kirchanski. He dislikes "snob" private schools as much as he does progressive public ones. "I'm not trying to form a precious little Groton or Eton. This is for kids, rich and poor, who want to learn. And what do we teach that's so damned unusual? Only the classics--reading, writing and arithmetic, the tools a human being needs to survive. We tell them not to worry about 'adjusting.' Get the tools first, and then you can adjust."

Friendly Non-Persuasion. Born in Yugoslavia, Kirchanski grew up in West Virginia, where his father was a coal miner and his mother worked in a factory. At eleven he was forced to go to work because his father died. Still he managed to purr through Detroit's Wayne State University in 2 1/2 years, then shot for a doctorate in political science at Berkeley. When he ran out of money, Kirchanski turned to schoolteaching, was disappointed at slow progress in "airy, friendly" classrooms. By contrast, when he taught convicts, Kirchanski made rapid progress. Public schools, he decided, were "so friendly that nothing was going on."

For hotly denouncing the situation, Kirchanski was finally fired from school-teaching. "When I got canned," says he, "I was 35 and I couldn't get a job. I decided to open my own school--it was better than pumping gas." His 3R prescription: "Discipline--on the basis of sensing the student's feelings and making him believe that what we're doing is important."

Though public schools pay more, 200 teachers have applied to work at 3R. "All they have to do here is teach," says Kirchanski. "They don't have to baby-sit or serve tea to parents." As a result, 3R has a ratio of one teacher to 15 students, compared with 30 in most public schools. Neither they nor their students show any fear of their polemical boss. Though the teachers joke about the McGuffey Reader, for example, they praise it even more because it has so few pictures that "the child is forced to learn to read." If 3R is a hard rather than a happy school, they feel, the results gladden a teacher's heart. "We say learning is work." says Teacher Kirchanski. "When the child works well and achieves something, that will make him happy."

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