Respect for Mental Muscle

Intensive tutoring, team spirit and competitive learning can transform educational slackers more thoroughly than any new fashion in educational content.

A dramatic case in point is the second straight victory of Los Angeles’ El Camino Real High School in the U.S. Academic Decathlon national championship on Saturday.

The nine-member Woodland Hills team, which beat out 39 other state teams, deserves unstinting applause.

Its members gave up weekends, endured cram sessions until 10 p.m. on weeknights and forged a mix of A, B and C students, as required by decathlon rules, into solid experts on this year’s topic, ancient history and literature.

The students had the benefit of experienced, winning coaches and help from local businesses that pitched in $250,000 to keep the L.A. Unified School District’s whole decathlon effort alive. They had tutoring and supportive parents. But in the end, they did it by themselves and for one another.

The idealism that inspired the first academic decathlon in 1968 may seem quaint. Orange County Supt. of Schools Robert Peterson saw the “peer challenge” as a way of creating small learning communities that motivated students who weren’t doing well.

To reach out to these students, the competition requires basically three A, three B and three C students on every team. (Granted, part of the art of decathlon coaching is spotting the smart slackers.)

The dream of small schools, small classes and students teaching one another isn’t dead. Private foundations are pouring money into pilot programs nationwide, but the average core-subject class in LAUSD high schools remains at about 40 students, and the average high school has a population in the thousands.

That makes the El Camino team -- Lindsey Cohen, Laura Descher, Benjamin Farahmand, Sean Follmer, Lindsay Gibbs, Brian Hwang, Jihwan Kim, Kevin Rosenberg and Micah Roth -- all the more remarkable.

If only more than nine students at a school could experience learning as a team effort worthy of their respect.