The Schools: Free the Schools

WHEN I had last been in Berlin, in 1988, the Wall still stood. The train trip through East Germany by night was eerie, passing row after row of barbed wire and flying past train stations boarded up since the end of the World War II. Little did I guess that within a year the gates would be thrown open. I watched on television as delirious crowds danced to Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy.”

Now, in April of 1993, I was returning to a reborn Berlin, to the annual conference of the European Council of National Associations of Independent Schools (ECNAIS). Berlin had been chosen as the site because of the rapidly emerging independent-school sector in the former Soviet Union and its satellites. Seventy delegates from fourteen countries, including six former Communist countries, gathered in this reborn city.

AB

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Alan Bonsteel

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WHEN I had last been in Berlin, in 1988, the Wall still stood. The train trip through East Germany by night was eerie, passing row after row of barbed wire and flying past train stations boarded up since the end of the World War II. Little did I guess that within a year the gates would be thrown open. I watched on television as delirious crowds danced to Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy.”

Now, in April of 1993, I was returning to a reborn Berlin, to the annual conference of the European Council of National Associations of Independent Schools (ECNAIS). Berlin had been chosen as the site because of the rapidly emerging independent-school sector in the former Soviet Union and its satellites. Seventy delegates from fourteen countries, including six former Communist countries, gathered in this reborn city.