Louise-Otto-Peters-School and Project „You in my Mi nd“ Germany Dear audience, Working on a presentation of our school, the Louise-Otto-Peters-School in Germany, I found it difficult to bring the presentation in line with the idea of the project we work on. So while we were travelling I decided to talk about how to connect school and project instead of showing photos of every day life at our vocational school in Germany. Our school is named after Louise-Otto-Peters, a well off lady of bourgeois background. She lived in midst 19th century dedicating her life to female workers and their families. She engaged herself in bringing up female workers and enhancing the life of their families. She aimed at educating them in order to enable them leading a life of their own. Above that she was a suffragette fighting for women’s right to vote. In so far the patron’s name of school should be programmatic – and its organization should meet the challenge. As our school is a vocational school mostly with female students the demands of Louise-Otto-Peters concerning female workers should be seen as an obligation. That is why the school offers – a hundred and fifty years later – general education on basic, intermediate and college levels. Besides that there are various fields in which the students can be trained: nursing, taking care of the elderly, health and nutrition. Above that there is an increasing demand in integrating handicapped students from special schools. There is also a demand to integrate students from the various branches within in the school itself as the different sections of a vocational school show a strong tendency towards leading a life of their own. And in addition the school is separated into the two branches at the towns of Hockenheim and Wiesloch about 16 kilometres apart. To integrate students within school the colleagues managed to bring a theatre group into being; to keep partnerships with a school in Msida / Malta and Assisi / Italy alive; to take part in Comenius Projects (2003/2004: Language project “Three generations – Two countries – Three languages”; 2005/2008: School project “Do You Speak Love?”; 2010/2012: “You in My Mind” and “United Tales of Europe”). That raises the common question “What is the Reason Why?” And the answer is: There is a professional and a personal response. Among the professional reasons there is the English language as the so called Lingua Franca of our time; the students should practise their abilities and improve them. Then the students should be made meeting people from other countries, they should learn that people in different countries live their own ways, that there are different cultures and different religious believes. And the students should become self-assured. Finally all those impressions are supposed to enable them for tolerance towards other people. And among the personal reasons there is above all the remembrance of the destroyed city of Mannheim still in the early 1950s – one of the outcomes of the World War II. There is the education by a father – he had been in service on many fronts stretching from Belgium and France to Russia and Africa between 1939 and 1945 – who did a lot to teach the young ones: is actually not the people themselves who fight against each other. You should meet people from abroad to learn that they not really different.

During the last sixty years world has changed in many parts – but not in every respect. Although travelling has become easy today there is still a lack of knowledge, an amount of illiteracy and hives prejudices. We should become aware that there are too many prejudices in the world – and that we should overcome them. Let us take the youth of Europe to overcome them. Volker Kronemayer, 2010-10-25, Kirikkale / Turkey