Education: The Littlest Freshman

As TV lights glinted off his dental braces, the youngest freshman got the biggest welcome at the University of California at Los Angeles. Lance Kerr, of Sun Valley, Calif., told newsmen that he likes swimming and baseball, hopes to be a research physicist, hopes his classmates like him. They doubtless will, but there is an age gap. Freshman Kerr* is only twelve years old, the youngest student in U.C.L.A. history.

The son of a salesman, Lance was a slow starter. “I used to be ashamed,” recalls his mother. “All my girl friends had children who could sing nursery rhymes. Lance didn’t even say anything.” Little did Mamma know. Just after he turned two, Lance began identifying cars by make. His mother thought he did it by recognizing shapes; it turned out that Lance was reading the name plates. In kindergarten, he unnerved the teacher by reading aloud to other tots during rest period. He mastered the multiplication table in three days, zipped through all six elementary grades in one year.

Lance picked up remarkable poise at Los Angeles’ private Buckley Schools, which stress self-discipline and no-nonsense learning. In the eleventh grade, he got an A average in science-rich studies, eased to a high B (and honors in Russian) in his senior year. He scored high on College Board aptitude tests: 634 on the verbal portion, 711 on the math portion (out of a possible 800). This summer he gobbled science fiction even at meals (“I couldn’t fight it,” says his mother), downed books on existentialism, extrasensory perception and Zen Buddhism. He also got hooked on jazz and played daily sand-lot baseball.

“I treat him as a twelve-year-old,” insists his mother, who feels that “you couldn’t drum all this into a child if he didn’t want it.” She hoped to get Lance into Harvard, cradle of child prodigies from Cotton Mather, who entered at twelve, to Cyberneticist Norbert Wiener, who was a graduate student at 14. But Harvard now looks askance at taking freshmen under 16. Caltech also rejected Lance because of his age (but will consider him as a graduate student).

U.C.L.A. feels that Lance will make the grade socially as well as academically. His youthfulness so far has thwarted only one ambition: he signed up for R.O.T.C. last week, got turned down until he reaches 16. Undaunted, Collegian Kerr plans to join the Boy Scouts.

* No kin to University of California President Clark Kerr.