Very Different Educations at Very Different Schools

At Institut Le Rosey in Rolle and Gstaad Switzerland most of the kids there were Crown Princes, soon to be Kings. So the curriculum was all about steel, chemistry, and industry, and grains, and agriculture, and economics, trade, military, and atom bombs. At Trinity-Pawling School most of the kids were seeking to be admitted to various colleges. and the curriculum was all about totally fanciful novels, poems, plays, and essays. Melville, Hawthorne, Hemingway, Dylan Thomas, Robert Frost, Abraham Lincoln, T.S. Eliot, Shakespeare. At St. John’s College in Annapolis Maryland the curriculum was all about ideas, ethics, philosophy, history, and physics. Plato, Dalton, Tolstoy, Newton, Lincoln, Democritus, Lucretius. At Navy Justice School, the curriculum was all about Military Rules of Evidence — extremely technical, exams twice a week, narrow rules pounded into your head to memorize. At Harvard Summer School the curriculum for me was all about transformational grammar, noun phrase, verb phrase, transforms, media lab, natural language, automated systems.

I learned to be a king and I learned to be a philosopher, and I learned that Plato wanted me to rule some Republic, but where, he did not tell me that. I would be happy with a village in Switzerland, or in Netherlands, or Australia, or New Zealand. I am not a polo player anymore. Just a polo ball now. No finicky. Will go where the players strike me. This way that way … whatever.