In deepest Bronx stands a six-story accretion of bile-colored brick, too ugly to be a mental hospital or a tannery. It is the Bronx High School of Science, and it is a nationally famed rookery for genius. The median IQ of its students is about 135, but in some classes the average runs to 145 or more. If training brains is what high schools are for, the Bronx school may be the best in the country; in 1956 and 1957, students at "Science" won a total of eleven National Merit Scholarships, more than any other high school in the U.S. This week, when the new batch of National Merit Scholarship awards was announced, the school had seven winners, again led the nation.
The Bronx brick pile is the embodiment of a theory, much argued by educators, that, like the slow-witted and the physically handicapped, bright students should be cut from the herd and schooled separately. It is one of four public high schools in New York City* permitted to accept or reject potential students on the basis of academic ability.
Science is harder to get into than most colleges; last summer 3,900 of New York City's brightest students applied, and only 750 were accepted. Occasionally, critics complain that such selectivity is undemocratic; others, notably onetime Harvard President James B. Conant, who is engaged in an intensive study of U.S. high schools, argue that modern comprehensive high schools can provide the varied training needed by all kinds of students, bright ones included.
The Key. A convincing partisan of the Bronx High School of Science is its principal, Alexander Taffel, 47, who took over the job this year when widely known Former Principal Morris Meister became president of the new Bronx Community College. Says Taffel, onetime gifted student at Townsend Harris, a high school shut down by New York City in 1942 in a wave of economy and possible equalitarianism: "We do a better job than comprehensive schools do in their honors courses. The teacher is the key; in our school the teacher doesn't have his courses divided so that he has to spend time with slower pupils. He's free to try new things. He can stimulate and become as stimulated as his students; if he's wise, he grows with them." Says one stimulated teacher: "It's a privilege to be here; it's constantly exhilarating. The problem is that so many of the kids are brighter than we are. We know darned well our IQs don't match most of theirs."
For science-minded teenagers, the elite high school has another justification. Explains Taffel: "Many Nobel Prizewinners do their outstanding work in their early 30s. There's so much to learn that you have to do it early or you won't arrive at the frontiers of research in time. You can't specialize narrowly any more; biology flows into biochemistry and on into mathematics." Jerome Metzner, chairman of the school's biology department, agrees: "When you get a bright youngster and focus his interest early, the kid soars like a comet. He gets a five-to ten-year start in professional life."