• U.S.

Education: Study As You Go

4 minute read
TIME

Like thousands of other 17-year-olds, Marie Martin and Dave Newby sweated through a College Board exam last week. Unlike most of the others, they were delightfully distant from their high schools in Illinois and Ohio. Ten miles east of the dark mountains of Communist China, Marie and Dave pondered answers in a classroom near Hong Kong. It was another fringe benefit in the maiden voyage of the International School of America, creation of Karl G. Jaeger, a budding (29) industrialist turned teacher. Tuition: $4,650 (including air fare).

Teacher Jaeger got the idea after wearying of his family’s thriving Jaeger Machine Co. (pumps, hoists, compressors) in Columbus, Ohio. A slight, intense young man, Jaeger had dabbled in engineering at Cornell, majored in education at Ohio State. Though his father gave him his own factory, Jaeger dreamed of Pied Pipering a study-as-you-go school around the world. Two years of teaching high school math in Columbus (while sitting on Jaeger Machine’s board of directors) convinced him. Last year Jaeger earned a teacher’s degree (Ed. M.) at Harvard, went to work setting up his globe-trotting school in earnest. Purpose: “To make students aware of world problems and motivate them to do something.”

Learn Abroad. To organize the trip, Jaeger visited 13 countries beforehand, arranged to borrow local classrooms, found English-speaking native families to take in his students (hotels are shunned). He got the school chartered by the New York Board of Regents, hired four top teachers. Among them: Ohio State Botanist Clarence E. Taft and Journalist-Author Edgar (Red Star Over China) Snow. Jaeger put in $30,000 of his own money to make up the difference between tuition and cost ($125,000).

First class of ten boys and twelve girls was chosen for brains and maturity rather than papa’s ability to pay (five students have full scholarships). Half are high school seniors, will get full credit for the year. The rest are recent high school graduates, may get college credit. The curriculum: English composition, biology, social science, French, all used as practical tools. The biology course, for example, focuses on the world’s food, health, and population problems. “We’re not trying to make experts,” says Jaeger. “There is nothing so obnoxious as a 17-year-old expert. But we do hope they will come back wanting to do something in some field.”

Think at Home. Starting at Harvard, where psychologists tested them on their prejudices (and will test them when they return), Jaeger’s 22 protégés have swept westward since September on one tourist flight after another. Each carries 44 lbs. of baggage, a dwindling $300 in pocket money. Behind them: Boston, New York, Washington, San Francisco, Honolulu, Tokyo. Ahead: Bangkok, Calcutta, New Delhi, Cairo (midyear exams), Istanbul, Athens, Rome, Florence, Geneva, Berlin, Paris, London (final exams). So far only one student has been lost; he missed the plane in Baltimore, caught up next day in San Francisco.

Last week, weary but still getting along famously together, the students haunted Hong Kong like gimleteyed inspectors general. After morning classes, they visited refugee housing projects, a noodle factory for the needy, several island fishing villages. They showed up at a Hindu wedding, wandered through a Macao gam bling casino, edged to within 100 yds. of Communist China. A U.S. consular official gave them a two-hour briefing; veteran New York Times Correspondent Tillman Durdin conducted a long bull session on Red China. Equally educating were the solitary strolls that many took through teeming Asian slums, a revelation to youngsters whose lives have been confined to comely U.S. suburbs. If education means widening perception, Teacher Jaeger is on to something. Muses Student Dave Newby, son of a Cleveland sales manager: “This whole trip has opened my eyes to things all around me at home that I’ve never really seen or thought about.”

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