Education: School for Tommy

“Armadillos,” wrote Tommy Kral the other day, “are very old mammals. They have an armorlike covering formed by ossification of the greater part of the skin and of the union of bony scutes.” Tommy is a 7½-year-old boy who lives on a farm near Hastings, Minn. He wrote his treatise, which he assembled from reference books, in legible longhand and in ink. The exercise was part of his schoolwork, but such assignments are hardly the usual fare for Minnesota second-graders. Neither are some of the topics the bright, assertive boy tackles with no apparent harm—parts of speech and sentence structure, German, geography, fractions, mythology and poetry (Robert Frost, Carl Sandburg) and chess.

Tommy’s only trouble is that he does not go to school. His parents, Otto Kral, farmer-mathematician, and his wife Mary belong to the Council for Basic Education, whose members argue, often in luxuriantly polemical terms, that much of U.S. education is rotten with soft courses and “life adjustment” theories. After Tommy’s first-grade year at the Lakeland-Afton public elementary school—where he got instruction in such matters as “language arts and social studies, whatever that means,” Mary Krai recalls with scorn—his parents refused to send him back. Instead, they set up a stiff, 5½-day-a-week curriculum for the boy, taught all the courses themselves except German. They are well enough qualified to do so; they are college graduates, and Mary Krai has held teaching certificates from Nebraska and Colorado. Her 35-year-old husband was trained as a chemist, now heads the Minneapolis Mining & Manufacturing Co.’s applied mathematics & statistics department.

Two weeks ago the Krals were in court in Stillwater, answering charges brought by School Superintendent Thomas Campbell that they are violating the state’s compulsory school attendance law. The embattled parents proudly reported the texts Tommy uses (one of them is a McGuffey Reader, copyrighted in 1879). submitted test results showing that their pupil has progressed some two years ahead of his contemporaries. The prosecution refused to argue about curriculum, and later, School Superintendent Thomas Campbell’s only remark was: “We feel we have a real fine elementary school program.”

Back at their farm, the Krals waited for a verdict—due after briefs are filed late this month—and Tommy Kral boasted to a visitor: “Sir, I want you to know I’m reading a book only 13-and 14-year-olds read.”