Education: School with Rule

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At 7:30 one morning last week, 54 sober youngsters filed into the one classroom at Arizona Language School in Phoenix to end their longest vacation of the year—two weeks. Aged 3½ to 9. they were soon too busy to mind the room's 95° heat. Until 5 in the afternoon, the kids were drilled relentlessly in reading, writing, arithmetic, music and calisthenics—taught mostly in foreign languages. So it goes at Arizona for 9½ hours a day, five days a week, 48 weeks a year. "I teach them to concentrate," says hard-driving Founder Reese Fuller, 34. "Children can't get this kind of education anywhere else." A graduate of the University of California, Fuller speaks Russian, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Greek and Latin, and is now studying Sanskrit, "so I'll be ready when my pupils reach high school." His experience includes an Air Force tour as one of the Pentagon's Russian interpreters and a period of teaching languages in a California high school. In 1959 he launched his own school to combat his pet hate: permissive education.