Good Timers Need Not Apply

By Ezra Bowen

At first it sounds like boot camp. "I'm tough on you because I want you to be tough and take anything I sling at you all year," snaps Instructor Ronald Marr to a group of ten young men and women. Then he softens, but not much: "My goal is to teach you how to learn, so that when you leave this classroom and this program, you can survive on your own."

For this audience at Landmark College in Putney, Vt., survival with any sense of self-esteem has been a lifelong vexation. The students are dyslectics, born with a condition that limits their ability to process received information into language. They tend to reverse numbers and letters (write w-a-s as s-a-w) and leave out whole phrases. Although they may understand a complex passage read aloud to them, they cannot read it themselves or write down what they know about it. Dyslectics--an estimated 10% to 12% of the U.S. population--often do not realize what is the matter and stumble downhill under the self-destructive notion that they are stupid. In fact, many victims are exceptionally bright and ambitious. Agatha Christie, Thomas Edison, Woodrow Wilson and Nelson Rockefeller were dyslectic, as are Singer Cher and Athlete-TV Pitchman Bruce Jenner. The National Institute of Dyslexia gives annual achievement awards; winners this year include Stanford Political Scientist Seymour Martin Lipset and Timothy Loose, a Tucson math teacher who learned to read when he was 20.

Marr's students are fully aware of their affliction and have come to Landmark from all over the country. Founded in September, it is the first postsecondary school in America devoted exclusively to teaching dyslectics. Typical is Andy Thompson, 26, who quit Franklin University in Columbus after fumbling through his classes, then got fired as an electronics technician because, as his wife Jane explains, "they said he was too slow and inattentive." Trey Smith, another Landmark enlistee, had similar symptoms and his own deep frustrations. A superb pulling guard at his Dallas high school, Smith saw a raft of football scholarships sink because of his hopeless transcript. Smith had known about his disability since he was eight; Thompson learned from a psychologist that he was dyslectic when he flunked out of Franklin. "No wonder I'm not making it," he thought at the time.

Dyslexia is incurable. Although Landmark and a handful of other institutions are proving that something can be done about it, the longer in life a dyslectic waits to undertake specialized instruction, the harder the job, partly because of accumulated frustrations. "You can imagine what it's like," says James Baucom, Landmark's director of education, "to be 17 years old and get up to read your report in front of a class and not be able to read a word."

At Landmark the prescription is, indeed, toughness. While other dyslectic programs, such as the highly regarded ones at Southern Illinois University and the University of Wisconsin at Oshkosh, employ learning crutches (e.g., tape- assisted reading or tutors during tests), Landmark's 82 students take the work straight as it comes, with lots of it. From 8 a.m. to 3:30 p.m., five days a week, some students in a special precollege group drill at tasks as elementary as multiplication tables and beginners' reading. Each precollege student also takes a daily one-hour private tutorial.

In the regular college-level courses, taught mainly by professors with no previous experience with dyslectics, nothing gets watered down or predigested. The students simply read, write, listen and learn until the material is burned into their minds, sometimes after follow-up study drills with specialists.The homework load is equally unremitting. Explains Landmark's founder, Dr. Charles Drake: "All material must be mastered to the point that . . . it becomes automatic to the student. A dyslectic will learn what we call first learning very easily, but when he tries to apply it the next day, it's just not there. We take whatever time is necessary to learn all these basic skills."

This regimen, focused on memorization, repetition and ultimately, mastery through rote, remains precisely as Drake, 64, planned when he picked up the bucolic 125-acre campus and buildings for a $620,000 song from the receivers of failed Windham College. In the catalog Drake warned, "The lazy, the indolent and the good-time seeker will not find Landmark suitable." He also might have warned that the tuition and fees ($17,500) make Landmark the most expensive college in America, with no help from the Government for student loans until the school earns formal accreditation for its two-year program.

Drake makes no apologies for the boot-camp curriculum or its cost. A dyslectic himself, he vividly remembers the frustration of being "the worst speller" at a back-country Georgia school. He managed to bootstrap his way to a teaching position at Berea College in Kentucky. While in that demanding role, at age 35, he finally found out what was wrong with him. From that moment he became devoted to helping other dyslectics, eventually founding a successful secondary school--also named Landmark--at Prides Crossing, Mass., in 1971, and another in Culver City, Calif., in 1983.

With the college's first academic year not yet over, Drake already sees signs of success, particularly in the tiny (5%) dropout rate: "We pick things up before they turn into a crisis and somebody simply disappears." One student in the precollege program has just been accepted by a university that had previously turned him down. Trey Smith feels ready academically to make it into a major university next fall. And Andy Thompson is doing handsomely--two B's and an A--with Landmark's stern formula. "I knew if I wanted to get anywhere in the real world," he says, "you can't get around your problem, you have to learn how to deal with it."

With reporting by Joelle Attinger/Boston and Rod Clarke/Putney