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Manners & Mechanics. To round off the embryo elite, there are afternoon lessons in music (all instruments), good manners and ballroom dancing, along with projects in radio, photography and chemistry. Manual training is mandatory, and older children will soon work part time in nearby factories to learn a trade. Each child must also learn to drive a car—and repair it. Every Friday comes "hygiene day," when all must pass personal inspection of clothes and quarters, and each dormitory also has a logbook for daily lapses: "Dust on the window ledge," or "Lint under Kolya's cot." The students get one day off a week (Sunday), and all must then clear the premises, visit relatives or friends. The reason (to prevent loneliness) illustrates the logic with which shrewd Principal Alexander Andreyevich Petrov runs the place. An able headmaster, Petrov is well paid; he and his teacher wife earn $300 monthly, a tidy income by Soviet standards. Petrov does not hold with physical punishment ("Rewards work better"). To encourage the emergence of "good qualities," he keeps a box for students to deposit notes (read publicly) describing their classmates' "positive" behavior. His discipline method is a point system in which a whole class is docked for individual transgressions or rewarded for individual triumphs. It is Principal Petrov's pride that his harshest punishment is sending a sinner home in midweek. Only gross insubordination, says he, moves him to invoke it.
If his students unanimously enjoy the school, as Petrov claims, it is a year-long pleasure. The school has its own fully stocked farm 20 miles away, where students camp every summer and learn agriculture while doing chores. More parents may find such attractions hard to resist; Petrov says that his waiting list is long. Most attractive of all is the tuition, scaled from $3 a month for low-income families to $50 for the wealthiest (average: $10). Even the top fee, which only four families pay. is well below the $80 a month that each student costs. For the school supplies not only food, shelter, books, learning and character, but also every stitch of clothing. "Our Soviet government," says Elite Hatcher Petrov proudly, "does not economize on children."