The libraries and labs, the greenhouse and music rooms (music rooms!), overflow with state-of-the-art equipment. In carpeted classrooms, eager students perch on the edges of their seats -- transfixed, engaged, learning. On Wednesdays -- "Inquiry Day" -- no classes are held. Students gather instead in their Internet-wired dorm rooms, or in IMSA's high-tech Center for Imagination and Inquiry or in one of the school's many cushy common areas, collaborating on such student research projects as "Bioinformatics and Recurrence Analysis in Detecting Correlative Patterns in Amino Acid Sequences," "Achievement Levels in Gender Segregated Classrooms" and "Antiretroviral Effects of C-Reactive Protein Against HIV."

And if the IMSA kids feel a bit like Stepford students, gliding through a Stepford school devoid of the messy, necessary chaos of adolescence -- the screaming and the sullenness; the spitballs and the stolen cars -- absent, too, is the threat of theft or violence on campus.

In many high schools a backpack isn't safe in a locked locker; a scuffed sneaker will trigger a fistfight, or worse. But at IMSA, backpacks are shed fearlessly outside the cafeteria door; the students come and go casually in and out of dorm rooms, greeting one another and teachers with calm affection as they pass in the halls.

The multiracial clusters of kids hanging out in the Student Life Center; the high visibility of gay, bisexual and gender-bent boys, girls and others; the lunchroom tables where magenta-haired, profusely pierced punks gobble spaghetti beside bespectacled bookworms picking at their salads -- all attest to a remarkable level of tolerance.

Where are the scenes of chaos, of rage, of neglect that dominate many American public high schools? Where are the dealers and slackers roaming dark, decrepit halls; the janitors painting over (and over) graffiti scribbled on puke-colored walls; the picketing teachers, the sewage-stinking bathrooms, the lunchtime brawls?

The pristine walls of IMSA are adorned instead with staff-authorized, student-made posters: "Party Clean -- go drug free." "Get Buff -- Carry Your Stuff." "Prayer Meetings M-T-Th-Fri, 7 a.m."

The anxiety that simmers beneath the surface here is not fear of crime, but of failure. "For some of our kids, failure is getting a B," says McGrath. "There's a question that many of our students have. 'Am I really qualified to be here? Am I really up to this?' Even once they realize that they are, it's a matter of rising to the level of their own expectations: straight A's and perfection on every assignment. That's a pretty high expectation for a teenager to have."

"It's the constant push for perfection that sets the environment and the people at IMSA apart from the 'normal' high school," says student Grace Woo. "Most of the pressure, we put on ourselves."

"Much of IMSA's budget goes into advertisement, and often it's painfully clear to the students that we're being put on display so that the school will seem worthy of receiving more money," says senior Kelli Willis. "I try my best to work up to my potential in school, but my activities and my mind-set are my own, my standards for my life and my future are my own, and they are based on what makes me happy."

"IMSA consists primarily of two types of people," asserts junior Lisa Yung. "Those who procrastinate at their own expense, neglecting whatever opportunities they may have just from attending this institution, and those who become engrossed in the obsession with college applications: 'I want to go to an Ivy League.' Why do I stay, then?" Lisa answers her own question: "Because this is as perfect as things may get."

Whether one sees IMSA as admirable or elitist, or both, the contrast between IMSA and the typical high school raises disturbing questions. Is it only our "gifted" children who deserve an IMSA-quality education? If tomorrow's nuclear physicists are worth $20,000 a year to us, how much should we spend on tomorrow's dancers, or teachers, or bus drivers?

If the state of Illinois can muster the public and private support required to offer this all-too-rare gift -- an excellent public school education, designed to foster the particular gifts and passions of its students -- to the few hundred gifted kids at IMSA, why can't every state and school district offer it, in one form or another, to every American teenager? And what might we save by educating kids today, instead of paying for their welfare checks, their therapist bills and their incarceration tomorrow?

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