Word: 3r
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...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...
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 4½. And it's all done without student geniuses...
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...