Education: Answers by Bus

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"Have fun, because when you're my age, you'll regret every day you didn't." With this parting paternal advice from Columbia University's President Dwight Eisenhower, 29 students from Europe and the Middle East set off on a tour of the U.S. During the next 24 days, they slept in farmhouses and penthouses, ate at Antoine's in New Orleans and hot-dog stands along the road. They wore beanies saying "Welcome to Amarillo," collected cowboy hats and corncob pipes, celebrated Bastille Day in Mississippi. They appeared on 30 radio programs, traveled 6,180 miles, posed for pictures with local mayors and circus freaks, sang Chattanooga Choo Choo in Chattanooga, saw sausages, newspapers and automobiles being made.

The trip had been the idea of an 18-year-old French boy named Jean-Marie LePargneur. He, like his fellow tourists, had spent a year at a U.S. school on an American Field Service scholarship. But he thought he ought to see more of the U.S. than just the school he went to in Beaver Dam, Wis. So did the A.F.S., but it didn't know where the money would come from. Jean-Marie replied, "I feel that anything is possible in the United States." Local civic groups put the students up, and Greyhound lent a bus; the entire cross-country trip for 29 students set A.F.S. back less than $2,000.

No Reserve. Last week, ready to sail home, the students reported on the land they had seen. Their favorite American: Eisenhower; their favorite state: Colorado. They had asked innumerable and pointed questions about Negro problems in the South, about isolationism in the Midwest. When one Midwesterner asked about the Marshall Plan, a French girl replied: "I do not wish to offend, but to properly discuss the Marshall Plan one should not eat for two days before."

The Netherlands' Anton Schrader, 29, the oldest in the crowd, had escaped from occupied Holland in a small boat, later parachuted back carrying OSS messages to the Dutch underground. After a year at Yale and the cross-country trip, he had been impressed by "the lack of class distinction, the materialistic thinking of most Americans, their absence of reserve, and the general lack of interest in church." One English girl who attended prep school at Bryn Mawr, Pa. thought that "the amount of food Americans waste is disgusting. The amount of clothes American girls have is tremendous—closets and drawers filled to overflowing." Said another English girl: "The overwhelming friendliness is the most striking thing about America. Central heating is next."

Why Cheat? But what about U.S. schools? Most of the visitors had found the work there much easier than at home. Therefore, said Czechoslovakia's Jaroslava Moserova, "Americans cheat far less in examinations. At home, everyone cheats and everyone helps. You write notes on your handkerchief or pin notes to your skirt. But when I go back, I'm going to study without cheating at all."