What Is an International School?

By Laura Forish American School of Paris

An International school is loosely defined as a school that does not require their students to learn the national or local language of the country the school is located in. These schools cater mainly to students who are not nationals of the host country, such as the children of the staff of international businesses, international organizations, foreign embassies, missions, or missionary programs.

That's Wikipedia's definition of an international school. Cold, objective and very very limited.

So, having worked in these amazingly complex, sometimes chaotic and always exciting institutions for over thirty years, what can I add to Wikipedia?

Although most international schools cover the PreK-12 age range, few students ever stay in one of these schools for that long. This turnover level has ramifications. Some of these are social. Students are quick to make new friends as they have lots of opportunities to do so. New students quickly find a place, as everyone understands what it is to be the "new kid on the block". Cliques are rarely an issue as people come and go regularly. And both students and teachers learn to say good-bye really well because they get a lot of practice doing it.

There are curricular ramifications of the nature of the student body in an international school as well. Though a school may follow one country's curriculum in general (e.g. American, British, Australian, Singaporean), differences are consistently taken into consideration. On a rather trivial level, both British and American spellings are normally accepted. On a deeper lever, one learns to view history from different and sometimes opposing perspectives. When Israelis and Saudis, Georgians and Russians, Irish, British and American (to name only a few) are in the same fourth grade class or seventh grade advisory or on a varsity team together much more is being learned than is outlined in curriculum guides. Multicultural understanding is both more important and easier to treat in the context of these schools.

Student bodies are quite diverse. In my own school of roughly 800 students, we are 45% American with 51 nationalities currently attending. Carrying more than one passport is the norm. as is students speaking multiple languages.

Yet these students work and play together with ease. We laugh and cry at the sane things. We find that there is more that unifies us than divides us.

If as the Duke of Wellington believed, "The Battle of Waterloo was won on the playing-fields of Eton". Then any hope for a more tolerant world is nurtured in the international schools of today.