Alumni News & Notes
Karl Jaeger, Ed.M.’58: Idea Man
by Lory Hough
Jaeger, front right, and ISA students
at Cairo’s Valley of the KingsKarl Jaeger, Ed.M.’58, could have had an easy life, inheriting his
family’s successful machine company in Columbus, Ohio. By now,
at the age of 76, he would at least be retired. But as a young man,
Jaeger wasn’t content with compressors and concrete mixers
and instead turned to students, initially teaching high school
math for a couple of years in Columbus before getting his master’s
at Harvard.
“I always felt like there was something fundamentally wrong with our education system,” he says from Bath, England, where he now lives.
Then in 1959 he founded the International School of America, a study-abroad program that sent young people around the world for two semesters with teachers and textbooks to live with host families and to learn by doing. In India they met Prime Minister Nehru for tea. In Hong Kong they visited refugee housing projects. Private meetings were arranged with Indira Ghandi, Eleanor Roosevelt, John Kenneth Galbraith, and Malcolm X, among others. The program was considered so unique that in the early years, popular magazines like Life and Time followed the students and wrote stories. National Geographic even did a 30-page spread in 1962, which included nearly three dozen photos by then-littleknown photographer Bill Eppidge, who later became famous for his photo of Bobby Kennedy lying dead on the floor of the Ambassador Hotel.
Today, although Jaeger is no longer running the program (it was taken over by Boston University in 2002), he’s far from “retired.” His latest project is called Our Future Planet, a nonprofit that is trying to get young people to recognize that they are part of the problem with the environment, as well as the solution.
“The planet they live in is not a very hospitable one,” he says. “They need to be more involved, whether they like it or not.” Jaeger says what sets the organization apart is the specific focus on young people combined with progressive programs centered around four topic areas — education, transportation, population, and business. Planet Car Club, for example, is a car-sharing program geared toward those who are often excluded from other programs (like Zipcar) because of age. Another program is connecting population-sparse countries and states like Sweden, Paraguay, and Maine to share best practices.
“They’re more dependent on automobiles because they’re not densely populated,” Jaeger says, “Electric cars may be a good option. Perhaps they can create a market amongst themselves.”
The nonprofit is also hoping to make inroads in the field of education, particularly in England, where Jaeger says many of the schools are run like they were 150 years ago. He’s working on a system of student-centered schools that would emphasize individuality and would offer only one grade: pass or fail.
“Students would progress at their own rate and have more choice in how, when, and what they study,” Jaeger says. Students would also have assigned mentors and lab work would include help from scientists, filmmakers, and other practitioners.
Jaeger is also working on perhaps his biggest, and most challenging, project to date: building a new town based in part on what he learned when he was traveling the world with the studyabroad students that would be car-free and pedestrian focused.
“England needs more housing. Bath itself is being forced by the government to build 10,000 new residences. This will mean thousands more cars polluting the air that Bath’s citizens and visitors breathe,” he says. “A pedestrianized ‘satellite’ town will help reduce this pollution. With transit links and a car-sharing scheme on site, pollution will be kept to a minimum.” He says he’s hopeful that the new town, which may be designed by Guggenheim architect Frank Gehry, will work out. “We need to be aware of global warming and sustainability when planning for this. A pedestrianized community has to be the solution.”
About the Article
A version of this article originally appeared in the Fall 2007 issue of Ed., the magazine of the Harvard Graduate School of Education.
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