A Grand Multi-Media Functionally Kinetic Thesis

"Students," read the cryptic two-inch ad in last month's Crimson, "if you would like to go to Japan, Hong Kong, Sri Lanka, India, Nepal, Iran, Jerusalem, Morocco, and Europe, call this number:----."

Once in a blue moon the International School of America makes its existence known in such a mysterious manner. It is a 15-year-old program that travels around the world for a year by jet, carries a three-member faculty and 30 students, who live with native families enroute, and are given a full year's academic credit by most American universities, including Harvard.

Because the International School has tried to keep its low profile, few people, including most Harvard administrators, know anything about it.

When Karl Jaeger first conceived of the traveling school, he wanted it to be different from anything that had come before--so much different that an attempt to describe it simply would belie its uniqueness and, as the years have granted, its mystery.

Jaeger, a board member of his family's power tool company and "independently wealthy" as he is wont to say, decided to create an educational alternative to lectures and exams while an undergraduate at Ohio State. "I was looking for something beyond common experience," he explains, "and traveling around the world seemed a good place to start. Later as a grad student at the Harvard Education School, I put together a program for which I could find no precedent. I studied one special school that traveled by ship to various distant ports, but it seemed to me that more of the world could be explored by going by jet, and living not in a stateroom or hotel, but with native people the way they really live."

The result--a sort of grand multi-media functionally kinetic thesis--was a 27-student global tour, subsidized by Jaeger, led by Edgar Snow, author of "Red Star Over China." Though the first year's trip didn't get into China, its course impressed enough educators (especially those who grant academic credit to students) to warrant continuation.

Each subsequent year's program was headed by a similarly respected name in a particular field (Huston Smith in religion, Daniel Lerner in sociology, Gregory Bateson in anthropology) and followed an itinerary chosen by the leader. The structure of the academic side of the school has remained as Jaeger first conceived it: a theoretical investigation ("Utopias" under Smith, "Change and Modernization" under Lerner, "The Nature and Culture of Man" under Bateson) substantiated by first-hand experience and supplemented by an occasional book and periodic class meetings to tie the whole thing together.

But as subsequent years have shown, the academic side of the trip has been secondary to the trip itself: the knowledge gained through the school has not been anything studied formally so much as the result of experiences of the entire year. As Bateson put it, "I taught that year as I suspect most others in my place did. Since I believe studying systems of thought requires a rigorous background, I tried to give students an intellectual set of baggage to be filled up with suitable related experience. But after a point, of course, acquiring the baggage has to cease, and getting out and finding experience to fit has to begin. I gave them a way to understand, I hope, what they were seeing, and then let them go off on their own. Most kept coming back to discuss their impressions with me, but those who didn't, I would suppose, learned just as much."

Two or three class sessions a week are offered during the trip, but not required if a student thinks he has something better to do. A "paper" is required at the year's end, but the work has taken such form as a dance by one student who studied dance by one student who studied dance cross-culturally, and even a verbal essay on the benefits of following after one's own thinking and one's own desires.

Jaeger, from his present home in Bath, England, would be anxious to stress not the freedom of his school, but its formal structure, so as to preserve the legitimacy the first trip have done little to undercut. And indeed, the formal structure of the International School is as sound as it has always appeared. But it remains the informal aspects that give the school its curious and unequalled appeal.

* * *

My introduction to the school's program--as a member of the Bateson trip four years ago--came at a three-day intensive "sensitivity session" at a mountain-top retreat on Hawaii's main island of Oahu. The Esalen Institute sent its leading counselor from California to help the 30 students of the school draw closer together, to form a cohesive bumper against the shocks of the different cultures the group would be moving through and living within.

But instead of diligently trying to follow the Esalen "let's be one, big happy family" credo, a part of the group decided to get drunk, watch the Hawaiian sunset, and go skinnydipping.

"I was disappointed," Jaeger reflects, "that unfortunate dissensions and power disputes within the group came to light so early in that trip. It was clear some people would simply do what they wanted to do." But, as he probably would not say, the structure of the school makes it possible for them to do it.

After a four-day paid vacation at a resort hotel on Waikiki ("I'll never be able to live this year again," said Jack, drinking mai-tais at the balcony of Jaeger's hotel penthouse, "so I'm not going to spend even 10 per cent of my time worrying about social interaction with the group or joining the group activities I don't want to join."), the school flew to Tokyo. Each student lived with a Japanese family to fulfill the school's philosophy of viewing the culture from the inside (watching from within the rice paper porch the gardener snip pine needles in the bonsai grove). Bateson and Jaeger also held daily orientation classes at their downtown hotel.

In two weeks, after flying to Kyoto, the next stop on the itinerary, classes were thrice weekly, as much for the security of having a mini-U.S.A. as for the discussions on the nature of the culture. Organized field trips explored various parts of the land from Kabuki theater to dawn fish markets. A tatami-mat coffee house near Ginkaku-ji temple that served saki and played early Dylan became an after-hours meeting place for many in the group, including the faculty.

Yet by the time the itinerary passed through Hong Kong and, for a few, the People's Republic of China, and came to the Indonesian island of Bali, classes were reduced to occasional Malaysian language lessons (in a temple compound within a mud-walled village), though any who requested more specific lessons readily received them.

Clay chose instead to learn about the nature of his own nature by climbing the island's sacred 10,000-foot active volcano, watch the Pacific and the horizon and all the rest of the world curve away from atop the crater's rim, and then spend three days lost in the jungle searching for a path down before travelling on alone to Java. Dick and Jerry wrote novels. King discovered the hallucinogenic sunsets of Kuta Beach, and chose to spend most of the rest of the year on his own considering interior horizons and the curious capacities of memory. Erik decided, while resting beside the waterfall pool where young villagers occasionally bathed, that he had traveled enough, but then, found himself in New Delhi hunting ganja, and still later, in Katmandu, exploring the Himalayas--all somewhat inexplicably.

As the journey progressed, Craig spoke in Kandy, Ceylon for those not present or soon to go off on their own, and for the majority still a part of the more formal journey, and for Karl Jaeger's designs for the school as a whole, when he toasted his twenty-first birthday with a small speech on Richard Henry Dana. "After Dana spent his two years before the mast," said Craig, "he returned to Boston to finish his schooling. He became a lawyer or politician or something, very respected in his society and not a little well-to-do, besides keeping a share of fame from his book. But on his deathbed he said, without even bothering with emotion, that nothing in his life meant quite as much as those early years travelling around the world, that every thing after seemed a little pale--pleasantly, perhaps, but still lacking in something not easy to describe that couldn't be refound, though once, it seemed, it would never fade." And as he sat back down, the silence of the room, in the context of the school's year, spoke more for the experience of the International School of America than any words.

After then travelling through India, Nepal, and the veldts of East Africa (where Land Rover safaris past Kilimanjaro and across the Serengeti plain were the major method of instruction), the year concluded at Jaeger's villa overlooking the Mediterranean at Sperlonga, Italy. Only a few of the students--one a woman who remained in a Sherpa village near Mt. Everest--failed to join the rest for the final week of the school. The week was given over to thesis writing (or dancing, or narrating) for those concerned about academic credit when they returned to their respective colleges.

Bateson and Jaeger held an evaluation meeting in which the general consensus was that the trip had been a success, and the International School deserved to continue indefinitely. Jaeger promised an alumni reunion at some future date aboard a cruise ship and suggest a short two-week excursion through the Caribbean.

* * *

This year's International School program is headed by Huston Smith and will study "Reality and Truth and Construct: Three Great Perspectives"--the perspectives being the Hindu, Buddhist, and Islamic religions. He stresses that, "Although I respect the theoretical basis of the school that allows personal freedom, a solid academic framework will keep the experience of the year from lacking solid academic focus." An anthropologist and a professor of Arabic studies complete the faculty. In past years, Jaeger, as executive director of the school, has appointed himself to the faculty, but this year his five-and two-year-old children and his involvement in the Bath Environment Campaign (to prevent a new motorway through the heart of the city, he explains) keeps him from going. He will still, however, subsidize roughly one third of the cost of the program.

The Harvard Financial Aid Office has, in the past, transferred Harvard scholarships and loans to cover the International School's $6600 tuition, but can say now only that cases have to be studied individually.

Credit at Harvard is contingent on the approval of the individual department, Edward T. Wilcox, director of General Education, says, "Because all I'm sure of is that the school is one of the very few cases Harvard does grant credit to, on the strength, if I remember rightly, of the strong faculty. I don't know which departments have given credit in the past--most of them I think--but I know we have set a precedent as far as getting full year's credit goes."

And that's about all anybody seems to know about it.