Education: College in a Castle

The growing unity of the nations around the North Atlantic must eventually include their schools. It is commonplace for a Frenchman to work making tires in Birmingham; the irony is that if his children go to school in Britain, they ruin their chances of entering French universities. Needed: commonly held standards that will permit secondary schools in any part of Europe to feed the universities of any other part. This fall, in a grand old castle in Wales, a school opened to work toward this goal by providing standards.

Atlantic College was born of a speech made in 1955 to NATO’s Defense College in Paris. The speaker was Kurt Hahn. 76, who founded Bavaria’s famed Salem School in 1920 and went on (after Hitler forced him out of Germany) to start Scotland’s tough Gordonstoun, where Prince Charles goes. The speech gave British Air Marshal Sir Lawrence Darvall an idea: a chain of international schools based on Hahn principles. Sir Lawrence, then head of the Defense College, had often been impressed by the way NATO got men divided by language., history and prejudice to work together without friction.

Darvall (since retired) helped to raise $840,000 and used $280,000 of it to buy St. Donat’s Castle, a magnificent edifice begun in the 12th century by a Norman nobleman and modernized by William Randolph Hearst when Hearst purchased it in the ’20s. Now the ancient corridors and narrow stone spiral stair wells echo to the footfalls of 55 boys from twelve nations.

The students, aged 16 to 19, are in classes roughly equivalent to junior college in the U.S., and on graduation should be able to enter the best universities anywhere. Their skull-busting curriculum requires 37 periods weekly, each boy taking four in his mother tongue, five in a second language and two in a third, plus a rich variety of courses from philosophy, music and the classics to history, economics and science. In accordance with the rigorous Hahn formula, the boys take numbing swims in the early morning, learn boat handling, pitch tents, skindive year-round in the chilly Severn estuary at the foot of the castle hill.

Already plans are being considered to build five other Atlantic colleges, autonomous except for an international council to hold up standards. If all goes well, there eventually will be international colleges in the U.S., Canada, France, Germany, and Greece.