The Bright D-Minus Kids

Go to college, continue your knowledge To be a person, smart, brave, and true; For if they can make penicillin out of moldy cheese, They surely can make something out of you. This bit of verse was written by Arnie Gant, a 15-year-old Negro who lives in a public-housing project in The Bronx and is one of the thousands of kids whom it has become fashionable for the ex perts to call "culturally deprived." But even while resenting that tag, Arnie sees some humor in everybody's eagerness to "save" him. He wrote his wry lines for fellow members of Columbia University's Project Double Discovery, one of about 40 programs that have proliferated this summer to help bright but borderline students get interested in--and into--college. These projects are a teen-age parallel to Project Head Start (TIME, July 2), the summertime preschooling program for five-and six-year-olds financed by federal anti-poverty funds. Like Head Start, they were pioneered by private foundations, then picked up by Sargent Shriver's Office of Economic Opportunity. Under the $2.5 million Government program--which, in the mania for rah-rah labels, Shriver calls Upward Bound --about 2,500 high school kids are enrolled in eight-week summer-training courses at 17 colleges, while another 25 projects are still privately financed. The Tragic View. Like Columbia's Double Discovery, the projects pluck kids out of stifling home environments, plop them down amidst such relative grandeur as the ivy-covered arches of Yale's Divinity School or the modernity of Western Washington State College's new Ridgeway Dormitory complex. "Why, this is a brand-new building!" cried one girl at Western Washington. "I thought you'd put us somewhere where it wouldn't matter if we wrecked things!" They live with college-age counselors, take rigorous academic instruction that ranges, as at Yale, from remedial composition to a course in Greek civilization that is described by the instructor as "the same one I'd teach Yale seniors." They are particularly quick at grasping ideas about conflict and tragedy in literature. "You don't have to convince these kids of the tragic view of life," says English Teacher Bruce MacDonald at Yale. "They know life is tough." Typically, the schools get the students up at 5:30 a.m., work them until noon, cart them off on tours of civic and his torical sites in the afternoon, assign three hours of homework, and provide time for the kids to have long talk sessions with advisers. Many of those who show promise will be given preferential admission if they apply to the same college after high school graduation. Integrated Seagulls. The main challenge to teachers is to get the youngsters to care about learning. "They are the D-minus crowd," says Western Washington's Dr. Charles J. Flora, "the kids who say to themselves, 'Hell, I could do it if I wanted to, but who wants to?' " That is no idle boast for many. The IQs in the Washington project average 118, for example, and the kids cannot be conned by condescension. Indeed, most of them have a healthy attitude about the whole experience and, in their teen-age lingo, they like to joke about being "socially depraved." Quipped a Seattle girl: "We didn't know we were deprived of anything until we read about it in the newspaper."-"In our stratum of society," proclaimed one shaggy-haired youth with a sly grin, "we don't aspire to haircuts." On a ferryboat outing to Victoria, B.C., a Negro student watched a number of black-backed gulls mingling overhead with grey and white herring gulls and chuckled: "We're being intellectually stimulated watching the integrated seagulls." Another boy, appalled by a teacher's professed ignorance about "pot" (marijuana), observed: "You'd sure be disadvantaged in my neighborhood." Trying to "Rate." Many teachers find that kind of saucy intelligence more promising than the studied sophistication they often get in their regular classes. "They respond in a rare and open way," says Yale's Morris Kaplan. "They're still capable of wonder." The kids, too, appreciate the frank talk. "Nobody ever thought I had an idea worth listening to," said a Western Washington girl. "So I never told anybody anything." Another student admitted that she had wasted her earlier high school years trying to "rate" among her friends. "I've learned more in these past seven weeks than I learned in the 17 years that went before," she says now. "I'm through with that 'ingroup' crap!" Most project officials are convinced that the $1,000 or so invested in each of the students this summer will bring big rewards in the saving of otherwise wasted talent and in the kids' own dis covery of their potentialities. Of the first 50 students at Western Washington, Instructor Richard Cobb says: "Ten are going to fail, one should have been sent home the first week, and seven of them would have made it without us. But for 32, we've been a godsend." Yet most of the students still must survive a year or more of high school back in their home environment, where this summer's glow can easily fade. "When you aspire, like they say," wonders one Negro boy, "don't you get slapped down that much easier?" Aware of this problem, many project leaders have assigned home-town counselors to keep in touch with the kids and to keep them Upward Bound.

*Echoing, in an urban way, Dwight Eisenhower's reminiscence about his Kansas boyhood: "I was of a big family of boys, six of us. And we were very poor, but the point is we didn't know we were poor."

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