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.

The conference was held at the Kreuzberg Waldorfschule, which in many ways symbolizes Germany's free schools. During the Second World War, Hitler outlawed altogether the "nonconformist" Waldorf schools developed by Rudolf Steiner, which share with the Montessori schools a philosophy of experiential learning. The Nazis also closed all Jewish private schools and cracked down with an iron fist on Catholic schools. After the war the West Germans, determined never to repeat this mistake, guaranteed in their new constitution the right of all children, regardless of family income, to a private-school education. Although the German government has never appropriated enough money to allow this concept to grow to its full potential, more than 6 per cent of all elementary and secondary students in the new unified Germany attend independent schools, which get along nicely with about two-thirds of the per-student expenditures of the public schools.

The Kreuzberg Waldorfschule is in an old building that was so close to the Berlin Wall that the sun was blocked off on one side. After the Wall came down, the school acquired an old Stasi secret-police station nearby in former East Berlin. The wires that had been used to bug telephones in the neighborhood were torn out and used as building materials for the playground, and the new annex became known affectionately as the "hole-in-the-wall" school. The eighth-graders of the school performed Schiller's William Tell for us, a play that embodies the spirit of freedom.

In the continuing debate about freedom in schooling in the United States, many commentators still overlook just how far out of step is the American centralized system of elementary and secondary government education. All the other developed countries offer more freedom of choice than we do.

Having visited independent schools in nine countries over the last fourteen years, I was at the conference to learn the latest trends in freedom in schooling, and to represent - alone, as it turned out - the United States.

Europeans are well aware of the poor quality of American public education and the frightening problems of guns and violence in our public schools. I wasn't altogether surprised, therefore, when I was asked to report on the several state initiatives which would provide the same freedom of educational choice to all that now only the wealthy enjoy.

At the break I was approached by one of Poland's delegates, a bubbly physicist named Elzbieta Putkiewicz. With an ear-to-ear smile, she told me, "Poland now has five hundred free schools supported by the Solidarity government at 30 to 50 per cent of the public-school rate per student. Maybe you Americans could learn from our experience?"

"That's very interesting," I replied, "but what do you mean 30 to 50 per cent? How does the government decide which it will be?"

"Oh, it's not like that," she giggled. "The government doesn't know how much it's spending!"

I had to laugh as well. In our own campaign for educational choice in California, school district after school district has claimed to be spending less than the basic Average Daily Attendance subsidy from the state.

Many of the Eastern European delegates were genuinely surprised to learn that in the United States, elementary and secondary education has remained a state monopoly. Several asked me why American voters would tolerate a "Soviet-style" education system. The best I could offer was that we do, at least, have freedom of choice in higher education, and we do have world-class universities.

How Others Do It

In 1987 I spent a month studying Denmark's system of free choice of schools. I visited schools for the handicapped, schools for ethnic minorities, and an "international school." I remember especially a school specializing in the fine arts. Although I arrived virtually unannounced, the school was neat and clean, and the students were all busily at work. The teacher who showed me around saw my astonishment and commented, "You know, Alan, it's a joy to teach in this school, because the students have chosen to be here and they value what we have to offer." Where is the American public-school teacher who could say as much?

In 1988 I spent a month in the Netherlands studying its system of educational freedom of choice, a right enshrined in its constitution. I met a grand total of one Dutchman who thought his country might be better off with an American-style compulsory government school system, and even he cheerfully admitted that he'd never in his life met another Dutchman who a reed with him. The closest the Dutch have come to any controversy about their fundamental values was when Islamic families grew numerous enough to demand their own school. Dutch liberalism and tolerance won out, however, and in 1987 the first Islamic school opened. Today there are five.

In Spain, about a third of all children attend independent schools. The Spanish delegates at the ECNAIS conference complained that their prime minister was trying to cut back independent school funding, even though he was a product of a private school and was sending his own daughter to a private school, "just like Bill Clinton."

In France, an attempt by the government in 1984 to take away government-funded independent schools was met by the largest nationwide demonstrations in French history - larger even than the anti-Vietnam War demonstrations of the 1960s. A million and a half citizens fought for, and won, the right to keep l'ecole libre.

The President of ECNAIS, Peter Mason, commented in Berlin about the unfortunate implications of American terminology regarding schools. Mason, a British intelligence officer during the Second World War, was for many years headmaster of the Manchester Grammar School.

"I don't like the term "Private school' at all," he said. "It implies exclusivity and elitism, and a school that accepts students from all walks of life who bring with them their fair share of educational tax dollars is anything but that. As well, the terminology in Great Britain is the reverse of yours: in the sixteenth century, when all schools were private, the better private schools that accepted students from all over England became known as |public' schools, and the name has stuck to this day. We prefer the terms |independent school' or |free school,' and I wish you in America would adopt the same terminology."

Nor does the word "public school" carry the same meaning in our country that it used to. America's public-school system is in fact extraordinarily heavily segregated in terms both of race and of economic class, a result of our insistence on assigning students to a particular school based on geographical residence.

Many Americans, shocked to see our public schools failing to supply textbooks, paper, and pencils to students, jump to the conclusion that the problem is lack of money. In fact, U.S. per-student expenditures, having risen 83 per cent in constant dollars between 1970 and 1987, are now higher than those of any other country in the world except Switzerland. Expressing the totals as a percentage of GNP makes us look only slightly better; Canada and the United Kingdom pull up even with us, and Switzerland stays ahead, but all other nations still lag behind. We are now spending 77 per cent more per student than Germany, for example, which has a slightly higher standard of living than we do and has far better educational outcomes.

The issue goes far beyond simply a question of quality. There is a creativity, an energy, a vitality in free schools. There is a commitment that comes from having freely chosen.

As the conference ended and I caught a taxi to Berlin's Tempelhof airport, I suddenly remembered something I'd forgotten to do. I asked the driver to stop at a souvenir stand so that I could buy a keepsake of my visit - a stone from the old Berlin Wall.

If the Berlin Wall could come down, I told myself, perhaps an American educational system that works isn't the impossible dream after all.

Dr. Bonsteel is a physician from San Ramon, California, and a volunteer worker for the Parental Choice in Education Initiative.