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.
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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.