Going to a Swiss International School, Part 1

 

[The account below, of my two years as an international-school student in Switzerland, is drawn from my memory.  Except for one trip I took in April 1965, during which I kept a journal, I had no help to recall the events, and there are gaps in places—which I regret but cannot remedy.

[Since this period is 56-58 years ago, many things have changed in the world, including the names of places and things.  I’m going to use the names as they were in the mid-1960s, though I’ll note the current name or word so that you who are too young to remember the ancient facts I toss around below won’t feel too lost. 

[Think of it as a black-and-white movie.  It’s a little odd, but that’s just the way things were in those days.  We lived with it; you can, too, for a short while.  The color will be back soon enough.]

My family lived in Europe from 1962 to 1967.  My father was a United States Foreign Service Officer, as readers of Rick On Theater will know by now.  He arrived in the small Rhineland city of Koblenz, Germany, his first post, in September 1962 and my mother joined him in October (see my post “Home Alone,” 12, 15, and 18 June 2015).  My brother and I came for our first visit to the Continent in December for the year-end school holidays (and my 16th birthday).

After I finished my sophomore year at boarding school in the states and my brother his eighth-grade year in the summer of 1963, we joined our parents in Koblenz for the beginning of what I came to see as a great adventure.  (I’ve recounted much of this experience in “An American Teen in Germany,” 9 and 12 March 2013.)  We went to high school in Switzerland starting in the fall of 1963.  Our parents had enrolled us in one of the several Swiss international schools that catered to foreigners, including Americans.

My brother stayed only for his first year and then returned to the States for the rest of his schooling, but I spent my last two years of high school in Switzerland.  I spent my junior year at the Collège du Léman, known as CDL.  (Lac Léman is the French name for Lake Geneva.)

The school, which had only opened its doors in 1960, was in Versoix, a tiny town of about 4,000 inhabitants at the time, 6½ miles north of Geneva along the western shore of the lake.  Versoix is less than a half hour from Geneva by car or train and has the distinction of being the birthplace of Josephine Boisdechêne (1827-75), the first bearded lady exhibited by P. T. Barnum—as Mme. Fortune Clofullia, “The Bearded Lady of Geneva.” 

The Collège du Léman’s name might be a little misleading for Americans because here a ‘college’ is usually a post-high school educational institution, an independent institution of higher learning that focuses on undergraduate education, such as Williams College or Vassar College, or a constituent part of a university, for example City College of New York (CCNY), part of the City University of New York (CUNY), or Harvard College, the undergraduate institution of Harvard University.

In Switzerland—and much of Europe—a college, or collège in the francophone world, is more like a U.S. prep school.  Also called an école de maturité (literally, ‘mature school’; it’s the same word as the Swiss leaving exam), it’s an educational institution for students leaving primary school at the end of compulsory education—11 years in Switzerland, the equivalent of 10th grade, or about 16 years of age—to prepare for the university entrance exam, the Maturité.  (In German-speaking cantons, a collège is often called a gymnasium, which is what they’re called in Germany.) 

I graduated from the International School of Geneva (École Internationale de Genève) the following year.  Known as Ecolint (or Écolint in French), the campus called La Grande Boissière (roughly, ‘The Great Wood’) is very near the up-scale residential suburb of Geneva called Chêne-Bougeries, a short tram ride from downtown Geneva (about 1½ miles to the west). 

Ecolint, the oldest of the world’s international schools, was founded in 1924 to serve the delegates and staff of the League of Nations (1920-46) and the other international organizations that orbited around it.  (Today it has three campuses—La Châtaigneraie [1971] in the Canton of Vaud, next of the Canton of Genève, and Campus des Nations [2005] in the Geneva suburb of Grand Saconnex—but they didn’t exist when I was a student at Ecolint.)

Let me back up a step.  I’ve been throwing around the term “international school” as if it were universally understood, that everyone knows what one is.  Obviously, that’s not so; unless you’ve had reason to deal with international education, you may not have encountered the term or the idea at all.  So let me try to define terms here, at least in the general way.

First of all, you might assume that international schools only exist abroad.  Well, of course that’s not true.  There are international schools here in the United States, including several in Washington, D.C., where I grew up, and in New York City, where I live now—as well as in other U.S. cities.  (Most international schools are located in large cities or their suburbs for reasons that will soon become obvious.)

Another assumption you might make is that all international schools are privately owned.  Most are, and the ones I’ll be talking about are.  There are types of international schools, however, that are run by countries and governments—though not usually by the host country, the country in which the school is located.

The United States maintains schools abroad for military families serving overseas, for example.  These schools are much like American public schools back in the states, except that they answer to the Department of Defense Education Activity rather than a state or county education department.  Their curriculum is entirely American, teaching all the same subjects you’d find in most stateside public schools—American history, American lit, American English, and so on.

France has a very centralized school system.  Every French school anywhere in the world teaches the same things on the same days from the same perspective, whether the school’s in Paris, Toulouse, or Guadeloupe.  All across the former French colonial empire, France maintains state-run schools for its expatriate citizens living overseas as well as local residents who want a French education (in preparation for attending university in France, for instance).  Instruction is in Standard (i.e., Parisian) French, rather than whatever dialect, such as Creole, is spoken in the host country.

Even among the private schools, however, there are distinctions.  Most of the better-known and more highly regarded international schools are not-for-profit institutions like private or independent schools and universities here in the States.  They aren’t administered by local, state, or national governments and are privately endowed, not supported by taxes.  (They are therefore also expensive.)  Ecolint is one of this type of international school.

Some international schools, though, are for-profit or proprietary institutions.  CDL is this kind of private school, founded and owned by Francis Clivaz, who held the post of headmaster, until he sold the school to Meritas, a group of for-profit prep schools headquartered in the United States, in 2008.  In 2015, CDL was resold to Nord Anglia Education, another for-profit corporation based in London.  When I was a student at CDL, Clivaz, who came from the village of Bluche in the Canton of Valais (Wallis), and his wife, Inge, ran the school as their income-producing business.

(For those who aren’t familiar with Swiss political geography, the country’s divided into 26 cantons.  I’ve already mentioned three of them: Vaud, Genève, and Valais.  The official name of Switzerland is the Swiss Confederation and the cantons, once sovereign nations, are the constituent members of the confederation.  In a loose sense, a Swiss canton is like a U.S. state or a Canadian province.

(Each canton, like an American state, has a capital—which, unlike many U.S. states, is also its largest city.  The capital of the Canton of Genève is Geneva; Versoix is also located in Genève.  The capitals of Vaud and Valais, known as Wallis in German, are Lausanne and Sion, respectively. 

(Cars in Switzerland are registered by canton, so the license plate numbers begin with an abbreviation of the canton’s name: VD, GE, VS; the abbreviations are widely used elsewhere as well—and yes, we teenaged American boys did have a chuckle over the code for Vaud.  The country code for Switzerland used on automobile placards, by the way, is CH, for Conféderation Hélvétique—Helvetian Confederation; Helvetia was the ancient Roman name for the region.)

There are several more-or-less formal definitions for international schools, formulated by the various organizations that represent and/or accredit them.  I’ll just go with my own version.  An international school is a school that caters to students who aren’t natives of the host country and offers a curriculum that’s different from the standard or authorized program of study of the host country.

Most international schools offer plans to prepare students for several national leaving exams, such as the American SAT’s (Scholastic Aptitude Test when I took it; Scholastic Assessment Test today); the British General Certificate of Education (GCE) as it was known in my day, or General Certificate of Secondary Education (GCSE), as it is today; or the world-renowned and notoriously terrifying French Baccalauréat. 

Some international schools will help students prepare for other national university entrance tests, including Germany’s Abitur or Switzerland’s Maturité (that’s its French name; it’s also known as Maturität in German or Maturità in Italian).

(I suppose most readers know that Switzerland is a multilingual country.  Most of you also probably know that Swiss speak German [62.6% of Swiss citizens are native speakers], French [22.9%], and Italian [8.2%] as official languages.  But how many Americans know that there’s actually a fourth official language in Switzerland: Romansh, spoken by a tiny 0.5% of Swiss. 

(A Romance language, Romansh is a descendant of the spoken Latin of the Romans.  It’s spoken only in the Canton of Grisons [or Graubünden] on the country’s eastern border; Grisons is the only canton that’s officially trilingual, with Romansh recognized alongside German and Italian. 

(I may have heard the language spoken once, on a train to Austria, but I have seen what I think was a Romansh-language newspaper someone left behind on that train. For a language geek like me, the very notion of a left-over Latin tongue still being spoken as a daily language is wildly intriguing!

(Most Swiss speak several languages, two or three of their own as well as any number of others in which people in the country do business in the 20th and 21st centuries.  The country, though, is roughly divided into three language districts—Romansh-speakers being relegated to a single canton. 

(Die Deutschschweiz or die deutsche Schweiz [German Switzerland] is largely in the east, north, and center of the country; la Suisse romande, la Romandie, or Romandy, the French area, in the west; and Svizzera italiana [Italian Switzerland], in the south.

(The three main Swiss languages are dialects, though Swiss Italian and Swiss French are pretty much the same as their Roman and Parisian mother versions.  I don’t know about the Italian spoken in Switzerland, but I had a lot of experience with Swiss French.  Geneva is only about 25 miles across the Rhone from France, so the languages spoken are nearly the same. 

(The only differences I found were slang and colloquialisms, and some standard vocabulary, most prominently in numerals.  While the French say soixante-dix [‘sixty-ten’] for ‘seventy,’ quatre-vingts [‘four twenties’] for ‘eighty,’ and quatre-vingt-dix [‘four-twenty-ten’] for ‘ninety,’ the Swiss count: septante, huitante, nonante.

(The language with the most difference with the mother tongue is Swiss German, or Schwyzer dütsch—there are varying spellings—which is largely a spoken dialect, though there are local newspapers printed in it.  It’s so different from Hochdeutsch that it’s a true Platt, not dissimilar to Austro-Bavarian dialect, which, after all, is spoken right next door in the Tyrolean Alps.  The differences between Hochdeutsch and Schwyzer dütsch makes them largely mutually unintelligible.

(The interesting thing about Schwyzer dütsch is that not only are there differences in vocabulary and pronunciation—where a German would say auf Wiedersehen for ‘goodbye,’ for instance, a Swiss German would say uf Wiederluege—but the whole speech pattern is different.  Schwyzer dütsch is spoken liltingly, almost sing-songy. 

(I took a train once with some of my CDL roommates over Whitsun weekend 1964, the middle of May.  We had a long weekend off from school and the three of us boys decided to go off on our own instead of going home to be with our parents.  So we went to Interlaken, in the Alps in the Canton of Bern, a 3¼-hour train trip.  The town’s called Interlaken because it’s nestled between two mountain lakes, Thunersee on the west and Brienzersee on the east.

(I won’t recount what mischief we got up to in Interlaken—we were three unchaperoned 16- and 17-year-old American boys in a country with no drinking age, so I’ll let you imagine—but on the train ride up, the conductor would come through the cars after each stop, chanting “nach Interlaken, nach Interlaken”—"to Interlaken”—except in Schwyzer dütsch it came out noch inter-LAAH-keh—and while Hochdeutsch is pronounced with guttural r’s, like gargling, Schwyzer dütsch is spoken with trilled r’s, like little birds tweeting!)

International schools are also at least bilingual.  I don’t mean the student bodies—they’re multilingual—but the instruction.  All the Swiss international schools that I know of teach in French and English; some also offer German instruction as well—principally the schools located in German Switzerland, such as Le Rosey in Gstaad (Canton of Bern).  At Ecolint, and I presume most other international schools, this division was semi-officially labeled “le côté français”/”the French side” and “le côté anglais”/“the English side.”

I don’t know if there were different curricula on the French side—say, a Swiss program or Belgian program alongside the French curriculum—but on the English side, we Americans, preparing for the SAT’s, had different classes in some subjects than our British schoolmates preparing for the GCE’s. 

Our classes such as English and history took an American approach—and often had American (or American-trained) teachers—while classes in the sciences, philosophy, or foreign languages had both American and British students.  (Students who weren’t either American or British but were studying in English would decide which track they wanted to follow.)

On the English side, we spoke mostly English in class (except, obviously, in foreign-language classes, which tended to be fairly immersive), but everything else—dorm life, the dining hall, interactions with the staff, going off campus into the little town of Versoix or to downtown Geneva—was in French.  (While Genevese speak multiple languages, Versoisiens weren’t as cosmopolitan.)

In social settings at school or in school groups, we all spoke a combination of French and English (sometimes with smatterings of other languages thrown in) among ourselves, with the French-speaking kids using more French than English and the English-speakers, vice versa.  This was the lingua franca of Swiss international-school students called Franglais.   (See my post on 1 July 2020 attempting to explain this phenomenon.)

There were exceptions to speaking French with the adults—at least for me.  (We didn’t speak Franglais with grown-ups.)  At CDL, for instance, the school secretary and the school nurse were both Swiss German.  Fräulein Ursula, the nurse, spoke French, of course, and Herr Peter spoke French and English, but I usually spoke German with them.  It was good practice for me, but, of course, I was also showing off a little.

The English the Continentals all spoke, by the way, was British English.  That was true all over Europe at that time.  The early and mid-’60s were still the era in which Europeans who learned English had British teachers (or teachers trained by Brits).  It was the transitional period to American English taking over as the dominant form of the language abroad. 

I not only became attuned to the British form of the language, I picked up some of the usages—otherwise a lot of people wouldn’t understand what I was saying.  Here’s an example: I grew up in Washington when we still had streetcars or trolleys.  I rode them regularly. 

Geneva had streetcars, too, and one ran in front of Ecolint along the Route de Chêne and was our transportation to downtown Geneva.  Except it was called the “tram.”  (The French word was also le tram, as it happens.  The system in those days was called Compagnie Genevoise des Tramways Électriques—the Geneva Electric Tramway Company.)  It took me years after I came home to stop calling streetcars “trams”!  

(Because most of us students were multilingual, Herr Peter’s name was the source of some ridicule.  The man was almost prototypically Swiss German: stiff, humorless, all-business, dressed in a very tailored suit, wearing rimless glasses.  Peter, of course, is merely the German name which is the same as the English one it looks like—only pronounced PAY-ter.  But in French, péter, pronounced PAY-tay, means ‘to fart’; ‘a fart’ is un pété, which sounds the same).  This we found to be hilariously appropriate.

(We also had a way of poking fun at M. Clivaz (pronounced CLEE-vah), the owner-headmaster of CDL, who was universally disliked among the students.  It was a little poem, a bit of doggerel of which there were two versions, one for the Americans and one for the Brits.  The American version went like this:

Cee-ell-eye

Vee-ay-zee

Looks like shit

And smells like pee.

(The Brits said:

Cee-ell-eye

Vee-ay-zed

Looks like a big turd

Lying on a bed.

(Clivaz’s wife, Inge, no more beloved than he was, was called ‘Al’ behind her back.  That stood for ‘assless’ because she was skinny and boney.  Yes, we were cruel, and I’m sure the Clivazs knew what we were saying, but my year at CDL was not a pleasant one.  My brother disliked it so much, he went back to the States after that one year.)

At both CDL and Ecolint, I had schoolmates from all over the world: much of Western Europe, Guinea, India, the PRC, Japan, Turkey, Kuwait, Iran.  (I even had one classmate at Ecolint who was an Iranian Jew, an unusual background even before the Islamic Revolution there [1978-79].  Henry Hay and I were friends, and I knew his family’s life in Tehran was difficult, but I never really understood why they stayed.)  There were also a bunch of kids with mixed national backgrounds.  

(Since the Swiss public education system was excellent, there were only a very small number of Swiss citizens among the student bodies of either school—and Swiss international schools overall.  Also, the international schools are expensive—among the costliest schools in the world—and Swiss state education is free, so why bear the additional financial burden?  Dominique Lindt, scion of the Swiss family that founded the chocolate company, was an obvious exception, but I didn’t know him well enough to know why.)

There were also many students who spoke not just two languages, but three and even four.  I was getting pretty fluent in French and German, but I had schoolmates who far outstripped my paltry efforts!

My schoolmates not only came from an assortment of countries, as you can see, but they also came for a variety of reasons.  The most common were kids like me: from families sent abroad and wanting to continue their children’s education in the same curriculum they left at home and/or to prepare them to attend a university in the homeland. 

Even within this group, there were differences.  I was the son of a diplomat stationed in Europe, so Switzerland was just “in the neighborhood” (no farther away from Germany, really, than the prep school I had attended in New Jersey was from Washington), but among my schoolmates were diplomats posted elsewhere in the world—one of my friends at Ecolint, for example, was the son of the Indian ambassador to Ghana. 

There were similar situations with students whose families were abroad for private business or non-official reasons.  Caterpiller, the heavy-machinery firm, had a large office in Geneva, for instance, and many of its expatriate employees sent their kids to international schools, including Ecolint. 

Aramco, the Arabian-American Oil Company that operated the oil concessions in Saudi Arabia (until it was nationalized by the Saudi government in 1988), had U.S. executives in Riyadh who also sent their children to school in Switzerland; one of my roommates at CDL, Gridley Strong, was the son of an Aramco executive. 

Gridley and I were particularly good friends at school.  He was funny—often inadvertently so—a real goer; he’d try anything—and sometimes paid a penalty for it.  After one trip home, Gridley brought me back a set of Bedouin robes, which I still have. (Later, they got some use as a stage costume at least once.) 

Ultimately, some escapade—I don’t remember what it was, but it was certainly innocent since Gridley never did anything malicious—got him banished to “Siberia,” what we called the school the Clivazs ran in the mountains of Valais, the École des Roches in the Clivaz hometown of Bluche, where “bad influences” were sent as punishment.  (Now an international hotel training school, Les Roches has an ironic name because in French it means ‘The Rocks’!) 

I never saw Gridley again after that, but he did write us a letter—I had three roommates at CDL and we had the largest room in the dorm, so it became the gathering place—and he said he was actually enjoying life at Les Roches.  Ever after his departure, whenever anyone got caught doing something daring but stupid, it was called “pulling a Gridley.”

Other schoolmates included my CDL roommate Stan Thom, whose dad was a professor at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa in Honolulu and my Ecolint roomie, Mark Dyen, the son of Isidore Dyen (1913-2008), a Yale professor on sabatical in Asia.  (Among Mark’s distinctions was his father’s full title: Professor of Malayo-Polynesian and Comparative Linguistics.  Now, there’s a mouthful.  Mark also used to make a punny joke on his father’s name: “Isidore Dyen?”  “I don’t know.  Does it have a pulse?”) 

Many of the students at international schools in Switzerland were children from wealthy or prominent families.  I mentioned my Ecolint classmate Dominique Lindt earlier, for instance.  Remember the Singing Nun (Jeannine Deckers, 1933-85) from around that time?  In French, she was known as Soeur Sourire—Sister Smile—and she had a pop song out called . . . “Dominique” (1963).  Don’t you know that whenever Lindt, who was something of a nerd, showed up in the dorm, someone burst out with that tune: Dominique-nique-nique . . . .

There was a pair of brothers, as different from each other as you could imagine.  They came from Ardmore, Oklahoma, and were from an oil-and-cattle family.  The older brother Charley, was a hick country boy; all he really cared about was ranching and running cattle.  He wore pretty much only blue jeans, cowboy boots, and plaid shirts.  His younger brother, Keats, styled himself after (early 1960s) Elvis, with a bit of Roy Orbison mixed in: a black pompadour hair-do, black pants and shirt and black boots.  He also played an electric guitar—he had the whole hook-up in his dorm room—all the time!

Their family name was French—like the mustard.  The Lindts had sold off the chocolate company long before Dominique came along; these Frenches lost the mustard business when another branch of the family—it may have been a brother of the original developer, I just don’t remember the tale—cut them out of the firm. 

(I’ll come to this story later, but over spring vacation in my senior year, Ecolint organized a trip to Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union.  Keats French went on it with a couple of dozen of my other schoolmates.  He took his whole guitar rig, including portable amps, and set it all up in the train compartments—the trip took three trains—between Geneva and Warsaw.  We had live rock ’n’ roll music playing all through the voyage, including out the open compartment windows whenever we pulled into a station.)

Also at Ecolint were the sons of Melvin Frank (1913-88), Hollywood screenwriter, producer, and director (A Touch of Class, 1973), and Robert Ardrey (1908-80), a playwright (Thunder Rock, 1939; ), screenwriter (They Knew What They Wanted, 1939; The Three Musketeers, 1948; Khartoum, 1966), and science writer (African Genesis, 1961; The Territorial Imperative, 1967).  Dan Ardrey was something of a pre-hippie or a late beatnik—but more intellectual.

A schoolmate at CDL was “Winny” Rockefeller (actually Winthrop Paul Rockefeller [1948-2006], later known as “Win”), the son of Winthrop Aldrich Rockefeller (1912-73; son of John D., Jr.; brother of John III, Nelson, and Laurance; and future governor of Arkansas [1967-71]).  Winny’s mother, with whom he was living at the time, was “Bobo” (Jievute Paulekiute Rockefeller, 1916-2008), daddy’s ex., who was partial to gold lamé outfits.  Winny was a real rich-kid jerk; he was so unpopular at CDL that we heard later his mother bought a school in England where he transferred.

[This is the first installment of “Going to a Swiss International School.”  There will be six parts in all, posted at three-day intervals.  I’ll be picking up in Part 2 where I left off above on Sunday, 2 May.  I hope you’ll come back to read the rest of my memoir on my two-year experience as an international-school student in Switzerland.]