Period: A boarding house above Lake Zug, one autumn term3 min readPublished:
Every Teacher Had to Sign Before Saturday in Zug
At Institut Montana on the Zugerberg, a boarder who wanted to go down the mountain on a Saturday needed a slip signed by his teachers. One of its former pupils remembers what that took.
Institut Montana sits on the Zugerberg, a mountain of modest height and magnificent view above Lake Zug. Between a boarder and the town below there used to be a piece of paper: the Ausgang slip.
Get it signed and you could go down to Zug on a Saturday afternoon, where there were shops, a lake and, depending on your priorities, food that was not served in a dining hall. Fail to get it signed and the mountain kept you.
The slip needed the signatures of the teachers. Each of them had the chance to say no.
A form that needs every teacher’s signature is a referendum on your week, held in ink.
A former pupil from Saudi Arabia remembered the slip as a central fact of his boarding life. You did not simply ask for Saturday. You earned it, signature by signature, across the week.
I have introduced a version of this at home and it has gone badly. When the eldest wanted to go to a concert in Antwerp, I invented a permission slip requiring sign-off from me, my husband and, as a joke, the dog. The eldest got my husband’s signature in four minutes, mine in an hour, and then produced the dog’s, a paw print in what turned out to be my good lipstick.
I signed. The dog, in my view, had abstained.
At Montana, things have since changed. A Swiss television report from 2022 followed a weekday boarder through the modern routine. She hands in her phone at half past nine. Homework happens in a supervised session called the Studium, with the lake in the window. Rooms are reshuffled each year, and the most desirable thing on the corridor is not a trip to Zug but a room facing the water.
So permission has moved from signatures to clocks. Nobody queues for ink any more; they queue for the phone basket.
I see the same shift in my own house. The eldest no longer asks permission for anything. He simply informs me of the time he will be back, as though announcing a train timetable, and then adds forty minutes.
Last Saturday he left a note on the fridge: “Back at 10.” Underneath, in a different pen, it had been countersigned.
The paw print was in my lipstick again.
About this story: the scenes and dialogue are imagined or freely retold. Facts about the schools mentioned come from published sources, which our school profiles cite.