John C. Corlette
John C. Corlette was born John Hubert Christian Corlette on 21 June 1911, and died 9 December 1977. He was the son of Hubert C Corlette (an Australian architect) & his wife Florence Gwynedd Davies-Berrington.
Corlette was an English architect who, in 1949, founded the private English-style boarding school Aiglon College in Switzerland. The school is registered as a not-for-profit charitable institution, with an international student intake. Corlette was a former pupil ("Stoic") of Stowe School in Buckinghamshire, and a former teacher at Gordonstoun, a private school in Scotland – he included some of the latter school's educational ideas in the formation of Aiglon.
Corlette's death in 1977 came after an extended illness.
Corlette was the son of an architect.
As a teenager, he attended Stowe School, in Buckinghamshire, England. Because of ill health (he had contracted pneumonia five times), he was advised to find a healthier environment, and it was recommended that he attend a school in Switzerland where the high altitude and drier air might assist his recovery – the same reasons that Switzerland was at that time renowned for its sanatoriums for people recovering from pulmonary infections and diseases. This is how he came to go to school in Chesières.
Corlette originally studied Philosophy, Politics, and Economics at Exeter College, Oxford, being admitted in 1930. However, his studies were interrupted due to illness and he returned after an absence of many years spent practising as an architect, to obtain a degree in history at the age of 32. After graduation he taught in at least three schools including Chaning-Pearce's school The College at South Leigh and Gordonstoun which he left after a difference of opinion with founder Kurt Hahn.
In 1949 Corlette opened his school in Chesières, the same village where he had gone to school as a teenager.
Like his mentor Kurt Hahn, John Corlette wrote no books to guide future generations in the creation of a curriculum. His speeches, like those of Kurt Hahn's, contain phrases that can guide the reader away from a focus on curriculum and textbooks and toward the use of philosophy and environment to improve the behaviour of "the whole man.”
The following extracts from a speech given by Corlette at Aiglon's end-of-term ceremony in July 1973 help illustrate his vision for the school. At the time of delivering this address, the school had expanded to nearly 300 students and had introduced co-education. However, the precepts that guided the early years of the school were still present 25 years after its foundation in 1949.
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