Just another reminder that what's going on in this country right now is truly embarrassing.

"Repeated persecution instilled into children like Leslie that they were part of an 'odious race' with 'devious minds' and that they were 'enemies of the people.' He felt he had almost internalised the endless denigration. 'I took it for granted as a fact,' he recalls.

But Leslie’s story was not just about humanity’s descent into evil perpetrated by Hitler and the way this shaped young minds. With great emotion, he urged me to consider writing about the woman who he felt had saved him: the school principal, Anna Essinger. Quite apart from her shrewd judgment in making a stand against Hitler, there was something about her courage and her unselfish vision to help children that Leslie felt should never be forgotten. He put me in touch with others who had been at her school and I began to investigate further.

While other school principals tried to compromise and accommodate Nazism, Anna thought differently, perhaps because of her experience of living in democratic America. Although born in Germany, as a young woman she had taken the unusual step of funding herself through ten years of education in America at the University of Wisconsin. In the early 1900s, progressive American thinkers, including the university’s president Charles van Hise, were challenging the status quo, arguing university research could be used to guide political thinking to improve the quality of life for all.  Inspired, Anna embarked on a degree and then an MA in education. For her, education was the key to progress; by inspiring the next generation with all that was good, humanity could advance. In the 1920s when she returned to postwar Germany, Anna turned her back on the old fashioned “rod of iron” approach to teaching and pioneered a modern, child-centred approach at Landschulheim Herrlingen, the progressive country boarding school she created in 1926, near Ulm in southern Germany."

~ Deborah Cadbury

"The Story of the School that Defied Nazi Ideological Control"

https://www.hnn.us/article/the-story-of-the-school-that-defied-nazi-ideologic