Dear friends,

We are an initiative of parents with little children who fight for unconventional ideas about learning and schooling. We stand up for more educational freedom in Germany and for our project to establish a small, democratic school in Bremen.

In Germany we have compulsory schooling. Homeschooling is absolutely forbidden. Furthermore, it is difficult to found a free school, especially in Bremen (that’s why we had a secret, non-authorized “school” here for 30 years – very much supported by Ivan Illich). By law authorities need to be convinced that this free school will provide the public educational system with new pedagogical ideas. And since Bremen does not want any free alternative schools for political reasons, this is a very difficult task.

The beginning of March, we had our first court trial where our lawsuit against the educational authorities was rejected for formal reasons. We had to resubmit our application, but were able to mend critical points after the hearing. Our next court trial will be in autumn. Since this is a long time and more of our children will be of school age in summer, we want to pave the way for our school by public and political activities (more soon).

But for all that we need your support! First of all in terms of money: We have to pay a lawyer and the court for our law suit. And we have expenses for the political and public events, among them a public discussion about small democratic schools and educational freedom. Until the end of the year we will probably need 8 – 10.000 Euro. That’s why we depend on donations. We are grateful for one-time contributions as well as for regular donations. Since we are non-profit, contributions can be deducted from tax.

Our bank connection is:

Freie Schule Bremen e.V.

# 11019353, Sparkasse Bremen, (bank code 29050101)

For European bank transfers:

IBAN: DE96 2905 0101 0011 0193 53

BIC: SBREDE22

And finally, Paypal:

https://www.paypal.com/cgi-bin/webscr?cmd=_s-xclick&hosted_button_id=4612970

We also need other active support: For example, we are looking for someone who could convert our website http://www.freie-schule-bremen.de to a good content-management-system und an embellish it a little bit.

We have also set up a new mailing list. We would be happy of many if you would register for further support: Just send an email without content and subject to:

freie-schule-bremen-subscribe@fischbecken.de

And it would be a great help if you could forward this mail to other people or mailing lists. Thank you very much for your support.

Best wishes

Silja Samerski und Matthias Rieger

EDUCATIONAL FREEDOM IN GERMANY

AN APPEAL FOR HELP AND DONATIONS AS OF JUNE, 2009