I’m teaching in the Theresianum-School in Eisenstadt. According to the international spirit, which goes through Europe, since within the European Community the whole continent has started to come very close together, we founded a sort of partnership with four other high schools in different countries: besides a Viennese partner we have also close contact to schools in Sweden, Ireland and even Lithuania now.

The whole thing started a few years ago, when two fellow teachers of mine began to get in touch with the Irish (from the Carlow region) and the Swedish friends, who live in the Southern part of the country in the Ödeshög area. The European Community itself promotes the further approach of its members to each others. There were a lot of international, either bilateral, either multilateral programs started, following this idea. And it is of course the young generation, open-minded to everything that is new and that gives them the facility to get to know friends, no matter where they are from. Austrian high school students are able to communicate in English quite well, so why not give them the chance to do so or improve their knowledge?

The COMENIUS-members are now working on “Youth in Europe in former days and today”. In September, three teachers of each school met in Sweden to prepare the project. We agreed, that the students had to get into e-mail-contact as soon as possible and to work out a survey about the leisure behaviours in their countries, in former times as well as today. And indeed, they all got into work quickly.

In the first week of April, the whole “Youth in Europe”-community met again in Eisenstadt and Vienna, that means at least two teachers and three students of each school. So the kids got into personal contact for the first time, and this made all the efforts worth it. They were shown typical dances and sports of each single country and also had to present their surveys to each others. One day, we also went to Sopron / Ödenburg, what (for most of them) was their first contact to Hungary or a region behind the former Iron Curtain whatsoever. The kids really were very happy and had lots of fun in these days in Eisenstadt. And they are looking forward to September, when they meet again in Ireland.

We, the teachers, are very proud and happy, that young people from four different countries get on well with each others so frankly. Lithuania, for instance, was a part of the Soviet Union for so many decades. Whereas we, the adults, unfortunately are still having this invisible border between East and West in our minds, the young people don´t feel this anymore. They don´t make any difference between Irish (West) and Lithuanians (East), for they grew up in a united continent already. And as long as we teachers are able to give our students the possibility to improve their English and to extend their personal horizons, to get in touch with students of the same age from different countries, we know that we are working in the spirit of the famous ancient Roman sentence which is “non scholae, sed vitae discimus” – we are learning for life, not for school.
 

Yours Walter Dujmovits, jr.