Word: sylvan
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...unfulfilled ambitions? The execution is not quite so imaginative as the premise. Tom (John Cullum) and Huck (George C. Scott) are both using assumed names, so it takes a long, creaky while for them to acknowledge each other as they circle the riverbank lookout of Michael Miller's evocatively sylvan set. Their reminiscences are not rich enough: it would help if they had led more complicated lives...
...Sylvan center in Walnut Creek, Calif., Aaron Ruiz, 8, frowns before an audiovisual machine. Like many other youngsters, Aaron has had learning problems: his school wanted to put him into special-education classes, but his mother brought him to Sylvan. A teacher shows Aaron flash cards that say HUG, LUG. He misreads the first word as bug, then catches his mistake. When he corrects it and completes the test successfully, the teacher rewards him with four yellow tokens. These can be exchanged at the "Sylvan store," where pupils trade their accumulated tokens for such goodies as Super GoBots, giant sunglasses...
...such results can be steep. Reading Game generally teaches pupils for 48 hours, costing a total of about $1,000. Sylvan recommends 36-hour blocks ($900); Huntington averages roughly 120 hours ($2,600). Says Nell P. Eurich, a trustee of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching and an expert on remedial training: "My only concern is that so few people can afford this type of program." Yet there has been no shortage of applicants to the centers ever since Reading Game Founder and President Kenneth Martyn opened his first one in Huntington Beach 16 years ago. Martyn...
...only seven Reading Game centers under franchise. "It's not like selling hamburgers," he says. His competition, by contrast, has gone predominantly into franchises, and all three companies are offering or moving into subjects such as writing, speed writing and algebra. The cost of setting up a franchise with Sylvan or Huntington is around $50,000 to $100,000, depending on size. The typical licensee is a businessman; Huntington Founder Ray Huntington was a business analyst for AT&T. Sylvan's president Berry Fowler, however, was a junior high art teacher until he switched to tutoring...
...teaching centers seem one of those ideas that please just about everybody, including businessmen: last year Sylvan was taken over by a child- care conglomerate called Kinder-Care Learning Centers, Inc. for $5.2 million in stock (some $3 million for Fowler). And Encyclopedia Britannica absorbed Reading Game for an undisclosed price. Huntington remains independent, its owner ebullient about the future of teaching for profit. "It's an American response to an academic problem," he says. "You can solve this problem and make money...