The Breather Year

"I was lying in a hospital bed recovering from appendicitis when it occurred to me I didn't have the foggiest notion what college was all about," recalls Robert Watkins, a graduate of St. George's prep school in Newport, R.I. "I wasn't ready." Some 4,000 miles away in Lugano, southernmost city in Switzerland, Mrs. Mary Crist Fleming, 54, was pondering a related idea. "Every bit of extra maturity and training a high school graduate can get before entering college is going to help," she said. "They need a breather, a chance to get excited again about learning."

These two attitudes mesh so nicely that Watkins, son of the Providence Journal's publisher, is now attending Mrs. Fleming's unique precollege travel and European studies program at her American School in Switzerland. A Radcliffe graduate who wanted to give her three children both a European experience and preparation for a U.S. college, Mrs. Fleming nine years ago opened her own high school in a 17th century cobblestone Lugano villa. It now has 100 students, all Americans. Yet Mrs. Fleming still felt that her "students were not getting as much out of Europe as they should." So she thought up the idea of a breather year.

In a Coal Mine. The plan lets U.S. high school graduates, free from all the pressures of being graded, alternately study in the relaxed resort city of Lugano and travel through Europe to quiz politicians, industrialists, cultural leaders, university students. "American students can't afford to be simply tourists--that day is over," explains the energetic director of the program, Ian D. Mellon, 31, an M.A. from New York University. The program's 88 students recently finished a two-week swing through Belgium and northeastern France. Their two dark green buses had carried them to Common Market headquarters in Brussels, a coal mine at Lens in northern France, the offices of UNESCO, Le Figaro, Le Monde and Paris-Match in Paris, Council of Europe headquarters in Strasbourg.

As one bus rolled through Brussels a faculty member barraged the students with questions. "Who recently introduced the lower bank rate in France?" A student's correct answer: "Valery Giscard d'Estaing." "Why?" "To spur investment." At the International School of Brussels, U.S. executives of Ford, I.T.T., Monsanto and Upjohn got a grilling from the students: "Why are Germany's gold reserves going down when its economy is booming?" "What marketing research have you done in Europe on oral contraceptives?" In Paris, the Americans met Gaullist students to discuss the mysteries of the world's teen-agers and the mystique of Charles de Gaulle.

At the Bolshoi. In earlier trips the youngsters had visited Lisbon and Tangier, explored an Olivetti factory near Naples, toured the Brolio winery in Florence, quizzed their way through East and West Berlin, Vienna, Prague, Munich. During spring vacation, some of the Americans talked with students at Moscow University, attended the Bolshoi Theater. Back at Lugano, a lively faculty (average age: 28) related the tour experiences to such required courses as contemporary Europe, European literature, logic and composition, French and Italian languages.

The cost of this education is high--about $5,000 for the year, including all the trips. The school shuns "unstable problem students," and "the oversophisticated," but welcomes late-blooming students whose high school grades may not have been tops. Yale-bound Jeff Graham, 17, son of a Michigan equipment manufacturer, sums up the experience: "At Exeter I did well, but had no great enthusiasm. I was in a sort of academic mud bog, but here something seemed to catch. This place has brought a lot of us out of our little tiny shells."

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