Strangers at St. Paul's

"Nyet!" cried Teacher Serge Kryzytski as one youngster produced a wrong answer. "Da!" he said with pleasure to another. Twelve intense boys and girls around the big table fished for answers. They were doing arithmetic--in rapid-fire Russian, a subject they had begun only three weeks before. By that time, the youngsters were midway in a course that usually spans a full year. Such is the pace and point of a remarkable summer session at proper St. Paul's School, which has opened its doors to bright kids from public and parochial schools all over New Hampshire.

St. Paul's summer school, called the Advanced Studies Program, is a pioneering blend of noblesse oblige and intelligent economics. For 102 years, the wealthy Episcopal bastion in Concord, N.H., shut tight each summer, sending its boys home for three months. This did not seem right to St. Paul's rector, the Rev. Matthew M. Warren, 54, who thought there must be some way to use those empty classrooms and dormitories. He decided to open them to the best young brains of rural, frugal New Hampshire, where no public high school yet offers Russian, calculus, advanced biology, chemistry or physics.

Intellectual Horsepower. With $100,000 from the Ford Foundation, Warren in 1958 launched a six-week cram school for 100 of the state's brightest boys. (Girls came in last year.) The idea: douse them in a year's worth of courses unavailable in their own schools--and in a high-octane intellectual atmosphere where the gifted could feel free to compete as hard as possible. This summer's 103 boys and 55 girls were culled from the top 5% of their classes after interviews with Director R. Philip Hugny, a onetime teacher at Rutgers who now spends most of his time scouring New Hampshire for summer students with "intellectual horsepower."

At St. Paul's, each student takes one basic course--anything from Greek to college-level physics. Those who take one year of calculus or of Russian get no credit unless they return for a second year. In addition, all students take a "vitamin" course in rhetoric and English composition. The weekly work load: 24 classes of 50 minutes each, plus at least 20 hours of studying. Only after a student is chosen does St. Paul's consider whether he is able to pay the $600 tuition. Help from business and foundations enables some students to pay as little as $25.

Pedagogue's Paradise. To teach St. Paul's A.S.P. students, Rector Warren has 19 summer teachers, among them faculty members from Yale, Smith and Dartmouth. It is hardly a vacation, but they enjoy compensations. As one science instructor put it, "The freedom. The equipment. Everything I've asked for I've gotten. This is a pedagogue's paradise."

As for the students, Rector Warren was "deathly afraid that we were creating intellectual snobs," who would find the schools they return to intolerable. But this does not seem to have happened to his 471 "graduates." Many of them had never reckoned on being able to go to college, but now find themselves sought by the most prestigious campuses. This month 39 colleges and universities sent recruiters to look over St. Paul's summer talent. Mused one youngster: "You'd think we were star football players."

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