Triple-Speed Learning

The children at City and Country School in Bloomfield Hills, Mich., can learn any subject in one-third of the time needed by ordinary kids. The quite plausible explanation is that the private school's 315 students (aged 3 to 13 ) have IQs averaging 144 and ranging up to 208. "They escape into intellectual activity instead of from it." says Headmaster George Roeper.

Vacation is no exception. Along with writing a play, choreographing a dance and reading A Tale of Two Cities, Roeper's seventh-graders were back in school this week after having spent Christmas voluntarily finishing up their first year of high school algebra. Tuning up for the school's spring "talent fair," a sixth-grader had polled all no state legislators on their views of Michigan's proposed new constitution. A seventh-grader fed radioactive food to mother mice to study its effect on sucklings; his pal built a Geiger counter to help out. One eighth-grader analyzed Detroit newspapers to see how fairly they covered Michigan's gubernatorial campaign. Another designed a tiny bathysphere with sensing devices, so he can send a hamster to the bottom of a deep lake and record its reactions.

CQ Plus IQ. City and Country owes its existence to Adolf Hitler. In 1936, the Nazis chased out Roeper's father-in-law,

Max Bondy, who had introduced coeducation in Germany. The Roepers joined him in Switzerland, where he and his wife opened a trilingual school; later they set up a U.S. branch (now the Windsor Mountain School, Lenox, Mass.); the Roepers then opened their own school in Detroit. In 1956, concerned about neglect of gifted kids, the Roepers decided to make it a place where "intellectual ability has prestige."

A onetime country estate with a 28-room mansion, the school now draws kids from all kinds of homes--not only the bright children of Bloomfield Hills auto executives but also such "finds" as a nine-year-old Detroit Negro girl with jobless parents and an IQ of 170. Typically, her public school called on the Roepers for help; her neighbors passed the hat for tuition (which runs from $600 to $800 a year). Wealthy parents sponsor many other such kids. A brotherhood of brains unites them all--the measure of which is that only 87 out of 420 bright applicants hurdled the entrance exams last year. One reason is that Roeper also insists on a high CQ (creativity quotient), determined in part by how imaginatively applicants tackle IQ tests. "We don't take children who are brilliant but incapable of original thought," says Roeper.

Life Is Work. At nursery level, Anne-marie Roeper introduces children to numbers, letters, maps, magnetism, gravity and the three states of matter. In kinder garten, the play extends to phonics, word games and Cuisenaire rods--a first-grade package. In second grade, having long since mastered multiplication, division and short essay writing, the kids read at fifth-grade level, pursue "the joy of discovery" in bright classrooms adorned with such helpful information as: "A paleontologist has to work very hard for the museum. He has to put dinosaur bones together. The hardest bones ever put together were Tyrannosaurus rex."

Already 2 1/2 years ahead of public school children, fifth-graders take off in a college-like departmental system under specialized teachers. Classes in each subject (math, science, English, social studies) meet five times a week. Homework averages two to three hours a night. Roeper wants his kids to think of life "as a place where work is taken for granted."

Controlling Snobbery. In science, the upper four grades cover everything from genetics to twelfth-grade chemistry. In English, students learn mythology, composition, Dickens, Twain, Shakespeare. In social studies, the range is from Greece to China and modern Russia. Every two weeks, the kids hand in independent research reports. One work sheet asked seventh-graders to analyze the significance of Adam Smith. Robert Walpole, Oliver Cromwell, John Milton, the Bill of Rights, the British Cabinet system, and the Commonwealth of Nations. Sixth-graders had to discuss Hernando Cortes, Pancho Villa.

Simon Bolivar and Benito Juarez, and write essays contrasting the Aztec and Mayan civilizations.

How to find suitable high schools for his peerless products is a problem that Roeper hopes to solve by building his own, if he can raise the money. How to keep them from becoming snobs is less of a problem. All "elite" notions are sternly repressed. "We make a clear separation between human values and skills," says Roeper. "The child learns that just because he's a whiz in math, he doesn't get two votes in student elections. We want them to know their place in society."

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