Word: jaegers
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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...
...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...
...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...