The Plus of Paris

In a Paris classroom last week, a pupil scrawled a familiar bit of U.S. doggerel across the blackboard: "No more classes; no more books; no more teacher's cross-eyed looks." He was an American schoolboy, and most of his 140 classmates were Americans too. The same afternoon, wilting in the hot Paris sun, U.S. Ambassador Jefferson Caffery spoke at exercises for the first six students to graduate from the school in seven years.

Though the American Community School had to share in all of France's shortages, its first postwar year had not gone badly. Textbooks, chalk and lamp bulbs were hard to get, the electric current was cut off frequently. But fiftyish Headmaster Paul de Rosay was an old hand at the game. He had first gone to France in World War I with a Harvard ambulance unit. In 1923 he opened the first American day school in Paris for the children of U.S. businessmen and diplomats abroad.

Two years later, the American High School was started. De Rosay later became its principal, served until it was shut down by World War II. De Rosay spent the war in the U.S., but returned to Paris to open his new school a year ago. It is equipped with such luxuries as an oil furnace, a cafeteria and a swimming pool. Tuition: $25 to $35 a month. Classes and subjects are much the same as in any U.S. school, except that French becomes as important as English: kindergarten children romp around singing French songs, kids in the lower grades give French plays. "Our real value," says De Rosay, "is to meet the needs of children going to the States for higher education. The plus value is that we like to return them less provincial. . . . The U.S. may have more running hot and cold doorknobs than anywhere else in the world, [but] there are still some things over here worth knowing about."

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