EDUCATION WATCH : Memo to Parents

In an era when competitiveness is said to have more to do with a nation’s educational success than with its natural resources, may we spare a moment’s consideration for the best student in what may be the best university in the nation? The University of California at Berkeley was judged the best university in the nation several years ago after a complex evaluation by the American Council of Learned Societies. This year Berkeley’s best student is Adam Joaquim Leite, who will receive its University Medal on Monday, signaling his position as “the most exceptional senior in a class of 5,550,” the university reports.

The secret of his success?

Leite was raised without TV. His parents, he says, “protected” him from selected parts of U.S. culture until he was old enough to make his own decisions. He doesn’t own a TV now, doesn’t plan to buy one. As a boy and now a 22-year-old man, he has always read for recreation. The only drawback to his upbringing, he says, is that “sometimes I feel like a stranger in my own culture. I don’t know the songs to Coke commercials or how to act or talk like Bart Simpson.”

In the average American home, the television set is turned on more than seven hours a day. By the time they leave school, American students have spent more time with the tube than they have with the teacher--with all too predictable results.

Obviously, Adam Joaquim Leite has great talent. Just as obviously, his parents--who raised him, by the way, not on a desert island but in Walnut Creek, Calif.--knew how to foster it.