The Swiss are proud of their schools. They know that their democratic institutions prospered because the cantons and communes set up schools for all children at the same time as they gave themselves and their Confederation modern constitutions in the first half of the nineteenth century. Education was declared to be a concern of the democratic polity. So schools are part of the national inheritance, a vital organ of the body politic. The authorities added secondary schools, vocational schools and colleges and a number of universities. The Confederation founded the Swiss Federal Institutes of Technology in Zurich and in Lausanne. The Confederation, the cantons and the communes give careful attention to educational matters; it is considered a civic honor to be elected to a governing body of a school district.

Nevertheless the official system cannot satisfy all needs. Authorities and teachers try hard to provide school education for all children and adolescents according to their aptitudes and inclinations. A comprehensive school system for a large group of the population is bound to envisage a type of woman or man adapted to the modern world. Adapted is a double-edged word. It means, on the one hand, conforming and employable at other people's convenience. It means, on the other hand, capable of coping with the modern world not only by bending to it but also, occasionally, by confronting it and by shaping one's own life in it. There are in the population of young people many more particular individuals than school planners are able to imagine. Although everybody agrees that schools should teach things that are useful to learners later in life, it is also a general complaint that one has to learn at school a lot of things one will never use and that one hears nothing of things one would badly need to know. Above that, there is a general consensus that the development and training of abilities are more important than imparting certain bits or areas of knowledge, although a stock of knowledge is necessary for minds to work upon. And is it only the mind that matters? Should not aesthetic sensibility also be developed, should not children also be trained to use their hands, should not their consciences be awakened and sharpened?

The pioneer of Swiss schools, Heinrich Pestalozzi, said that every child's head and heat and hands ought to be exercised. He did not wait in his time, two hundred years ago, for the authorities to be persuaded to accept his ideas. He founded schools himself on his own initiative and then the public authorities followed him. The Swiss cantons provide kindergartens, elementary and secondary education for nine years and later vocational schools all free of cost. But they allow private schools to teach children at the age of compulsory education under the supervision of educational authorities who have to see to it that the general targets set for state schools are attained. School education for age groups above 1 5 years can be provided by anyone who can hold their places on the market. Thus there are in Switzerland a large number of private schools catering for a great variety of educational demands with amazing flexibility. Their association counted 23 1 members in 1997.

There are several motives for setting up private schools. The state schools are not denominational. Where parents feel that state schools are too secular or, to their taste, "pagan" and where they want a specifically religious education for their children they may group together and run a private denominational school with a distinct educational philosophy and pedagogic orientation tinged by religion. The names of those schools normally reflect their more or less distinct denominational character.

A second group of private schools are based on specific pedagogic philosophies or doctrines and methods. The state schools, they feel, are too utilitarian, care too little for the arts or for music, put too much emphasis on intellectual faculties and do not enough to cultivate children's imaginative capacities or aesthetic perception or are too indifferent to ethics, or, conversely; are too slow and do not do enough for children with a very high IQ so that they feel bored and frustrated. In general, it must be said that teachers in Swiss state schools enjoy; rightly; great freedom of action in the classroom and have full scope for their own pedagogic faculties and ingenuity. Among the private schools for children at the age of compulsory education there are a variety of valuable experimental or "unorthodox" schools with a more or less homogeneously oriented staff, such as Montessori schools, Rudolf Steiner or Waldorf schools, and many more.

There are also kindergartens and schools for children with more or less specific difficulties or handicaps who find it difficult to adapt to the official school system and who need special attention and care. It is less an elaborate or sophisticated pedagogy that is to be pursued than methods that have to be found to suit particular children. Sometimes pupils of this sort of school must also be housed there.

Globalisation of the economy implies a sort of globalization of education. This does not mean that schools should be the same all over the world. When business corporation's post men and women in foreign countries for some length of time, families will want to be with them and children must go to school in the country of residence. Roughly one fifth of the seven million inhabitants of Switzerland are people of foreign extraction. Children of non-Swiss parents who are likely to remain in this country or in Europe face problems of adjustment to two cultures. Other parents of children of foreign nationality who will sooner or later return to their home countries and pursue their further education there will want them to be able to go to a school where they can prepare for examinations in the home country or even sit, in Switzerland, examinations valid in the home country. Private schools in Switzerland of this kind will adapt their curricula to the requirements of foreign examinations and recruit staff accordingly. Sometimes they will have to comply with regulations of other countries in their teaching methods and equipment. As the families of their pupils are not all of them resident in the same region, they will also have to provide accommodation and be run as boarding schools.

Apart from schools catering for pupils of one foreign country there are international schools taking in pupils from any country or from several countries. It is easy to see that they have to find solutions for a number of unusual problems. In schools of this sort children learn at an early age to get on with contemporaries with a foreign national or ethnic background, although most of them have similar social backgrounds.

At a higher level are to be mentioned schools and colleges preparing for entrance examinations to universities for people from Switzerland or other countries who decide later than usual, e.g. after passing an apprenticeship for or even practising an altogether different vocation. Or they have passed the greater part of their childhood and adolescence elsewhere and now want to enter a Swiss university. Or they have attended state secondary schools but could not fit in there for one reason or another. They will want and be able to acquire the necessary knowledge, skills, and abilities required for admission to a university in a much shorter time than is given to younger pupils, which is possible provided they are taught and coached in the right way.

Language schools make up a considerable portion of the private educational sector. True state schools in Switzerland teach more foreign languages than is usual in many other countries and very often teach them exceedingly well. Nevertheless, it is hardly possible in the course of the normal school time to reach in a foreign language a level of proficiency required for either practising a profession or pursuing a course of studies in the country where the language is spoken. The number of languages to be learned is on the increase. This, too, is a consequence of globalization. So there is a large market for language teaching with rather keen competition among schools.

Special private vocational schools and institutes at university level have begun to rise in new areas of learning. One of the first fields to be cultivated by private educational enterprise was the training of medical assistants and training for work in the catering and tourist industries. In recent years there have been a growing number of schools for information processing and business administration. Some of them can be considered pioneers in their fields or competitors with state schools for efficiency of teaching.

Authorities have to worry a great deal about the cost of education when they draw up their budgets. Citizens hardly know how much the state or a local community spends per capita of the school population. Neither do they know how much they profit from the general taxpayer in the bringing up of their children or how much they in turn pay for other people's children to be brought up at school. The value of a product supplied or a service provided is measured or roughly guessed not only by its utility but also by the use one actually makes of it. In education, learning matters more in the end than teaching. It is only much later that one finds out what one owes to the schools one has been to. As long as children are at school, nobody knows what their education is really worth. This, taken for all in all, is blissful ignorance. In periods of prosperity public expenditure for education is almost popular; there was a time, not so long ago, when public authorities almost vied with one another in spending money that way these times are no longer. Economies are called for, but it is not easy to find the right places and depths for cuts. Superior authorities and ordinary schoolboards have begun to learn the science of scholastic economy.

Governing bodies, headmasters and headmistresses of private schools have always been familiar with the full set of financial problems from finding money for paying qualified staff to providing the means for the construction, equipment, and maintenance of all the buildings and accommodation nowadays required. They also have to determine the demand they want and are expected to meet and to fix prices people are prepared to pay. Moreover, private schools have to find the location most suitable to their purpose and see whether they can pay the price of land or rent. One of the financial propositions often overlooked by outsiders is that buildings and facilities can be used only part of the time as pupils have to be taught many different and particular subjects. Schools have their own problems with economies of size. And what is to be done with the buildings during vacation time, about a quarter of the year, when they are empty?

The states and the communes can point out that they offer a wide variety of educational services free of cost or at only nominal fees and that those who do not find it good enough and want something extra should pay for it out of their own pockets. There is a certain republican and egalitarian pride in this attitude, which is not entirely without justification. Nevertheless, questions pose themselves and should be gone into, such as to which degree private schools complete the public system or even relieve it of charges which it might reasonably be expected to shoulder. Some problems have long been known to exist but have never found a lobby. And some private schools co-operate with the public system where solutions can be found for rational and politically viable cost sharing. Sometimes a subsidy to a private school might be justified. But subsidies are hard to get in lean years on a field where public expenditure is already very high.

These remarks are not more than pointers to a wide range of enterprises and problems. It is amazing that there are in Switzerland, alongside a highly developed public system, such a large number of private schools holding their own, successfully serving their clients and pupils. Public educational authorities might profit from the experience of private institutions in their quest of humane and nevertheless efficient and economic ways of running a school.

(JOURNAL HKSJ 1/99)

GCN wish to express our gratitude to Mrs. Akiko Huerlimann for release of this article.