Citizenship education
Learning at school and in society

POLIS Project: Citizenship Education

Munich, Bavaria, Germany

The Volksschule of Munich works as a Greek Polis. The teachers, students and parents agree on important decisions. Thus, everybody has the right to vote within his or her little school State. The action of the Volksscule is rooted in the democratic principles (references to German law VSO 42-51 and Bay EUG 57-58). Students are encouraged to develop their handwork talents, learning also to cultivate a biological garden, engaging themselves in social projects and offering, through micro-firms inside the school (computer science, cycles, catering services, travel agencies, printing press, etc.), and modern services to their community.

Five hundred and nine students, of the 5th to the 9th grades (20 groups), attend the Polis-school. The teachers conduct their classes with a free pedagogy of work and an independent learning. The students are encouraged to develop independent projects in collaboration with their peers, who frequently aim at new ideas for the school firms, on the condition that they may allow the participants to do practical courses.
Three important anthropological points underlie the concept of Polis:
1. All human beings have many capacities for a practical kind work and are entitled to develop it.
2. The learning process must be done in an active world, so that enough space is devoted to free courses.
3. The development of the students' abstract knowledge and intellectual performances is unwanted.
Parents, students and teachers have the right to vote. Thus, different ministers are chosen to direct the Polis-school's affairs (home affairs, foreign affairs with press service, economy, social aspect, finances, pedagogy and culture). The school magazine "POLIS" allows information to circulate among the different groups involved.

The group of teachers who conceived this project had this idea: "We do not want the school to become a place where students get prepared for life, since school is life. People know what democracy really means, the day they experience it. We do not want to speak of the act of voting, we want to vote. We do not want to speak of the concept of firm, but to found firms. We do not want to speak about justice, but of rights!" Then, they have the idea of creating a POLIS in their school, in the image of the Greek Polis, in the very origin of democracy: a state within a state.

Volksschule München
Gerhart-Hauptmann Teachers Group Ring 15 (Hauptschule)
81 737 München Germany
Tel.: 089/ 63 49 7070
E-mail: hs.ghr@t-online.de

Institutional Partners
Akademie für Lehrerfortbildung, Dillingen Akademie für Reformpädagogik, Freiburg.
Financial Partners
Initiative Praktisches Lernen, Bayern

1997-1998 for the idea; in September 1998, the POLIS was founded. But it is really at the beginning of the year 1999-2000 that it started working as such.

It was awarded the "Initiative Hauptschule der Gemeinnützigen", and HERTIE Scholarship, 1999.