When Schools Stop Looking Away: Germany's Bold Plan to Fight Discrimination

There’s a plaque above the entrance of a high school in Renningen, Germany. It makes a promise:“School without Racism – School with Courage.”But here’s the thing — the people running this program aren’t pretending that plaque is some kind of magic shield. As outgoing director Sanem Kleff puts it bluntly,“There is no school without racism. The plaque is not a vaccine against racism.”

That honesty is what makes Schule ohne Rassismus – Schule mit Courage so different. Founded in 1995 in response to racist attacks on Turkish immigrants, this network has grown into Germany’s largest school initiative, now connecting more than 5,000 schools and 2.5 million students. But unlike awareness campaigns that show up for a day and vanish, this is structural. Schools that join commit to something radical: they promise not to look away when discrimination happens.

So what does that actually look like in practice? On a January day, 10th- and 11th-graders at participating schools spend hours in workshops where actors stage realistic scenarios — a racist remark on a bus, a tense confrontation in public — and students practice stepping in. They learn about microaggressions and othering. They study how to recognize boundaries and understand sexualized violence. At the Heidelberg location, students walk up stairs marked“step against racism”every single day. Another school produces films about bias. Another hosts peer-led workshops. The point: students move from passive witnesses to active participants in shaping their school’s culture.

The network’s membership requirement is straightforward but demanding — at least 70 percent of students, teachers, and staff must formally commit to opposing discrimination and addressing incidents. It’s not a checklist you complete and move on. As Kleff explains,“If discrimination, violence, or bullying happen at our school, then we do not look away. We talk about it and solve it.”Under her 25-year leadership, the initiative expanded beyond racism to include discrimination based on nationality, religion, gender, sexual orientation, and physical attributes.

Here’s where it gets tricky, though. While the network has flourished, so has extremism in German schools. Reports of right-wing incidents have spiked in recent years. Some teachers face racist slurs and even threats. So does voluntary participation, however enthusiastic, move the needle? Kleff doesn’t claim it’s a silver bullet.“There are things we cannot change,”she admits — like overhauling teacher education systems or dismantling structural inequality. But she resists despair. Schools, she argues, are“micro-societies; they change.”Small shifts matter. At one Berlin school where Kleff taught for 20 years, staff carved five minutes off regular classes to make room for student-led activities. Communication improved. Conflicts surfaced earlier. The climate shifted.

The lesson here applies well beyond Germany. Most American schools already have pieces of this model — student councils, peer mediation, community partnerships. What the German example suggests is the power of connecting those dots into something coherent, with clear expectations and student leadership at the core. As Kleff tells anyone working in education:“Don’t wait for perfect conditions. Do something — even something small. It can grow.”Because silence, she insists, is the worst option of all.