In 1998, David Deutsch argued that no school can be non-coercive. By “school” he meant an institution that concentrates learning resources and opportunities in one place, and that most children would voluntarily turn to for several hours on most days during most of their childhoods. The core of the argument was that children’s interests are too diverse, too personal, and too sporadic for any single institution to hold their voluntary attention long enough to meet that bar. The only existing institution that comes close, he concluded, is “the entire town (or city, or society, or internet) that the children have access to, including their homes, and their friends’ homes, and excluding only the existing schools.”

I think Deutsch is right to be skeptical that schools can be non-coercive. He is also right to highlight the importance of an environment diverse enough to attract children’s voluntary engagement. But his argument stops one step too early. Diversity is not enough. What matters just as much is whether children can participate in the world around them, and in real towns much of that world remains closed to them. But there is an institution, already existing in embryonic form, that points toward a solution: the miniature city.

Access Is Not Participation

Deutsch’s argument proceeds by analogy. Rather than imagining existing schools with all the coercion removed, he asks us to begin with institutions that already attract children voluntarily. Imagine, he says, trying to modify a cinema so that most children spend most of their time there voluntarily. You would need to raise attendance from perhaps 30 percent of a town’s children for two hours a week to 90 percent for 30 hours. But Hollywood is already doing its best to make films attractive, and even that is nowhere near enough. Expand the analogy to a mall with an ice rink, bookshops, burger bars, and the same logic holds. Even a child who likes the mall’s ice rink may prefer to play tennis or football elsewhere, visit a better bookshop in town, go to an exciting pizza place, or simply stay in their room to work on a project of their own. A mall still cannot outshine the town as a whole in diversity and personal relevance. If it could, it would. Therefore, the only non-coercive school is the entire town.

The argument is compelling, as far as it goes. But it contains a hidden assumption: that access to a town means meaningful participation in it. For adults, this is broadly true. For children, it is not.

A ten-year-old boy may have some access to the town. He can walk its streets, browse its shops, and eat its food. But he cannot work in its bakery. He cannot run for its city council. He cannot meaningfully start a business, write for its newspaper, or apprentice himself to most trades. This is not to say that children never participate in the more serious realities of life. Older children and adolescents may babysit, help in family businesses, do odd jobs, or take on small informal responsibilities. But these forms of participation are usually marginal, exceptional, or tightly limited, not open entry into the central economic and civic life of the town. As the educational thinker Horst Rumpf observed, the history of childhood over the last two hundred years is, in large part, a history of exclusion from adult life.

This matters because of the epistemology that underlies Deutsch’s argument. Karl Popper argued that knowledge grows through conjecture and criticism, not by having information poured in from outside, but by the mind actively generating theories, testing them against reality, and revising them when they fail.

For this process to work, two things are necessary, and they are distinct but connected:

First, the learner must be free to form their own conjectures, to choose what to try, what to care about, what to explore. This is the freedom Deutsch rightly argues schools cannot provide: the curriculum largely determines which conjectures the child is permitted to pursue.

Second, there must be genuine feedback from reality. The conjectures must actually be tested against reality, not against an authority’s judgment of them. When feedback comes from a grade or a red mark, several things go wrong at once: the child learns to correct their theories relative to what the authority thinks rather than relative to whether the idea actually works; the implicit question shifts from Does this work? to Does this satisfy the authority?; and over time, children learn which conjectures are permitted rather than developing the capacity to generate and test their own. A child who goes out underdressed and freezes learns something from the cold itself. This feedback is unmediated, inarguable, and impossible to game. A grade is none of these things. It is one person’s fallible theory about the work, delivered as verdict.

Schools typically fail on both conditions. Real towns do much better on the first, but for children they often fail on the second. Not because natural feedback is absent in towns. It is abundant. The problem is that children are structurally excluded from many of the activities that generate it. And when participation is closed off in this way, freedom of conjecture is narrowed in practice as well. A child may be free to wonder whether they would be good at running a bakery, writing for a newspaper, or taking part in policy-making, but if no one will let them try, those conjectures cannot be meaningfully pursued.

Rumpf captures the contradiction well: children are locked out of adult life, and yet they are supposed to grow up. How can one prepare someone for something when one systematically excludes them from it? The conventional answer is school: a place set apart from the world, where the world is broken into lessons and poured back into the child as course material. But if Popper and Deutsch are right, this cannot work. The unconventional answer is the town. Yet for children, the town offers freedom without meaningful participation in productive enterprises. It offers the freedom to wander, to observe, and to consume, but not to take part in many of the activities where choices have real consequences. Children are free, but free to do what? To watch others make things, decide policy, and conduct business. That is not, in any rich sense, Popperian education.

The Miniature City

This is where miniature cities enter the picture. They offer children access to forms of participation from which real towns often exclude them. Mini-Munich, which has run in Munich since 1979 as a summer program lasting a few weeks, is the best-known example, and the model has since spread to hundreds of similar projects, primarily in Germany and Austria.

In Mini-Munich, up to 2,500 children per day, aged six to fifteen, run bakeries, publish newspapers, operate radio and television stations, manage banks, sit on city councils, adjudicate disputes, start businesses, and earn and spend a local currency called MiMüs. They can also attend the city’s university, give lectures of their own, and listen to lectures by others. Adults facilitate but do not direct. There is no curriculum, no compulsory attendance, and no exams. A child who wants to leave the bakery to work for the newspaper can do so. A child who wants to sit and do nothing can do that too.

The miniature city also includes workshops, artistic venues, and a full apparatus of civic administration. Children can work in tailoring, glassblowing, gardening, architecture, theatre, cooking, and many other activities, and they can take part in collective governance through a city council, mayoralty, citizens’ assembly, and courts.

What matters is the interdependence of the roles. The city functions as a social order rather than a collection of separate activities. An architecture studio may be asked to design a façade or interior for another enterprise. A marketing agency may be hired to create flyers and advertising material. Advertisement spots can be bought in the newspaper. Decisions in one part of the city create needs, opportunities, and problems in others. Children participate in a world of mutual dependence that responds to what they do.

Reality as Teacher

When a child runs a detective agency in Mini-Munich and does it badly, customers stop coming. This is the internal feedback of a working economy. When a child writes for the newspaper and makes errors, other children complain that they are poorly, incorrectly, or incomprehensibly informed. When a child sits on the city council and proposes a policy, that policy may be debated, adopted, tested in practice, and later revised or abolished based on the outcomes it produced. When something goes wrong in the kitchen, a snail turns up in the salad because it was not washed properly, it is in the newspaper that evening, and three people from the kitchen are in the television studio the next day answering the news anchor’s questions. This actually happened.

As Rumpf, who spent two days observing the city, put it: mistakes are never made visible through red marks and grades, but always through the consequences of actions and the protests and objections of others. This is conjecture and criticism at work within a social fabric that makes error-correction natural rather than punitive.

Consider the contrast with school. In school, a child writes an essay and a teacher grades it. The feedback is authoritative, external, and only loosely connected to whether the writing works for anyone besides the teacher. In Mini-Munich, a child designs an advertising flyer for another enterprise. If the text is confusing, ungrammatical, or hard to understand, the flyer fails in its purpose. Customers do not respond, and the enterprise that commissioned it complains. The feedback is not imposed by authority. It comes from whether the writing actually achieves its objectives.

Or consider politics. In school, children are sometimes permitted to stage political debates in the classroom with assigned roles, but money and power remain outside. In Mini-Munich, children propose laws, debate them in citizens’ assemblies, elect mayors, and live with the consequences. When the children’s city council introduced a police force in 1985, various incidents led the same council to abolish it. When an enterprising group of children set up a stock exchange in collaboration with the bank, it produced MiMü millionaires and a speculative bubble. The point is not just that these decisions have consequences, but that they can be tested. They do not remain matters of classroom discussion alone. They are tried in practice, and in that way become open to criticism, revision, and abandonment if necessary.

What makes this possible is the limited scale of the miniature city. Its institutions are small enough for children’s actions to matter, and clear enough in their workings so that feedback is less buried under noise than it is in adult society, where the effects of decisions are harder to isolate and thus harder to learn from.

The Effective Diversity of a Town

Deutsch’s central point about diversity is worth restating. No single institution, he argues, can match the diversity of the town as a whole. No cinema, no mall, no single building can outshine it in the range of attractions it offers children. Mini-Munich complicates this picture. It is, after all, a single place, and yet it does manage to attract thousands of children voluntarily for most of the time during the three weeks it takes place. In that sense, it appears to come close to satisfying Deutsch’s own criterion for a non-coercive school.

Meanwhile, real towns, despite their enormous diversity, contain vast amounts of activity that children can observe but not meaningfully enter. This is not always because the activities themselves are beyond them. More often, adult institutions are shaped by legal restrictions, economic incentives, and cultural inhibitions that make children’s participation difficult to accommodate. The effective diversity of a town, from a child’s perspective, may therefore be considerably smaller than it appears. A miniature city that concentrates the activities children actually find engaging, and makes them participable rather than merely observable, might for practical purposes approach or even exceed the effective diversity of a real town.

Between 1,000 and 2,500 children show up to Mini-Munich voluntarily each day during the summer. Attendance varies with the weather: on hot days many children prefer to go swimming instead. In that respect, Deutsch’s point still stands. Even a miniature city this attractive does not displace the wider town, or the many other things children may freely choose to do. But it shows that a single institution can become a place children voluntarily choose for most of the day, for weeks at a time, while remaining in open competition with the rest of the world. When funding was threatened in 1985, children organised letters, phone chains, and visits to real politicians to save it, securing a funding commitment of 100,000 DM. They did this on their own initiative, initially without the knowledge of the adult organisers. It is hard to imagine children mobilising in quite this way to defend an ordinary school.

Order Without Direction

A miniature city is designed by adults, and that invites two worries: first, that it is imposed from above, that its structure is fixed in advance by the choices of its adult organizers; second, that even without compulsion it channels children toward some activities rather than others.

The first worry is easy enough to answer. Every human institution is designed by someone. The relevant distinction is not between designed and undesigned environments, but between designing a framework and designing outcomes. Mini-Munich’s currency, citizenship rules, and democratic procedures are designed in the way that a constitution is designed. But what emerges within that framework is not: which businesses children start, which laws they pass, which market bubbles occur, which mayor is elected, which newspaper stories are written, which kitchen scandals erupt on the evening news. Adults create conditions for emergence without dictating what emerges. In that respect, Mini-Munich resembles a functioning liberal society.

The second worry is harder to answer. A miniature city with eighty enterprises is still a curated subset of reality. It does not make every possible pursuit equally available or equally central. The gravitational pull of a rich institutional environment is itself a subtle form of channeling, even without compulsion. By making some conjectures dramatically easier to pursue than others, the city shapes what children try, not through coercion, but through the sheer weight of what is available and what is not.

But the more important question is not whether children are being channeled, but toward what. The miniature city is built around civic and economic participation, around making things, selling things, governing, publishing, and working. The picture of adult life that children typically encounter is badly distorted by comparison. Online, they are exposed to influencers, which selects heavily for visibility over substance. From adults, they are encouraged to become doctors, lawyers, or whatever else carries prestige. And the economy is visible to them only as its outputs: products to consume, services to use, with the actual work of production out of sight. No wonder children have little understanding of the vast texture of economic and civic life that actually keeps a society running. The miniature city’s channeling is part of what makes it valuable. It offers children a more honest picture of what a society actually consists of.

It is true that the miniature city does not mirror the full range of every possible human interest, and it would be dishonest to pretend otherwise. This does not mean, however, that children are limited to a predetermined set of activities. Children who wanted a stock exchange built one. Children who wanted to strike organised one. If a child wants to introduce something that does not yet exist, there is room for it, though it requires their own initiative, just as it would in the real world.

More telling than any official description is the behaviour of the children themselves. They are not performing for adults. They are engaged in activities that matter to them within a system that responds to their actions. Rumpf recounts an eight-year-old garbage collector with his red cap and real wheeled bin, who develops a different awareness of dirt on streets and the problems of street cleaning than even the most vivid school lesson could produce. The children who conduct surveys on the street come to understand polling not through a lesson on survey methodology, but through the experience of asking strangers questions and recording what they say. Imagination, here, becomes the medium through which they come to know the serious adult world.

And yet the city does not become what Rumpf calls infantilised, a fantasy disconnected from reality. The seriousness is maintained by several structural features: the binding economic and citizenship rules; the adult craftspeople whose competence children sense immediately; the real materials and equipment, real glassblowing tools, real stage lights, that demand careful handling; and above all, the public sphere of the city itself, which ceaselessly subjects everything to scrutiny through newspapers, television, and civic debate. If something goes wrong, the city’s own media apparatus ensures it becomes a matter of public discussion. The result is, as Rumpf puts it, enough fun that reality does not become crushing, and enough seriousness that the surplus of fun does not become childish.

What Remains to Be Addressed

Deutsch’s 1998 essay was, in a sense, a conversation-stopper. If the only non-coercive school is an entire town, and towns exclude children from meaningful participation, then we are stuck. The miniature city reopens the conversation. It is not a conventional school, but it is closer than schools usually are to what people have hoped school could be: a place where young people learn, not because they are forced to, but because the world they inhabit responds to them, challenges them, and takes them seriously.

Children’s interests are indeed too diverse and too personal for a curriculum. But they may not be too diverse for a city, even a miniature one, if that city gives children genuine roles, real economic participation, and a say in collective decisions.

The remaining questions are hard. Can the model run year-round, rather than for three summer weeks, while retaining its attractiveness? How does it relate to the real town around it, not as a replacement but as a complement, a bridge between the child’s world and the adult world that Deutsch rightly says should be open to them? These are serious problems. But they are engineering problems, not philosophical impossibilities. They are, in the Popperian spirit, a better set of problems to work on than the ones we had before.

Mini-Munich was not built by philosophers. It was built by a group of cultural pedagogues in Munich who, through decades of trial and error with smaller projects, play cities made of cardboard and beer crates, historical city games, media cities, factory cities, gradually developed the practical knowledge needed to construct something that works. They might not describe what they built in the terms I have used here. But what they built, whether they intended it or not, is a partial answer to one of the deepest questions in the philosophy of education: how to give children the freedom to form their own conjectures and the reality against which to test them, without coercion, without curriculum, and without the condescension of assuming they cannot handle a world that takes them seriously.

Reinhard Kahl, a renowned journalist and filmmaker, made a documentary about Mini-Munich and what makes this temporary miniature city such a remarkable place of learning. The article that follows is his written account of that experience and appears here in English for the first time. Translated by Daniel Fetz with the kind permission of Reinhard Kahl.

With approximately 1,500 children, we wait in the morning outside the Zenith halls in Munich to be let in. By midday, nearly 2,500 children will be counted. Over the next three weeks, I want to observe with my camera team what the children do in Mini-Munich, how they do it, and what unfolds within them and between them, as well as between them and the adults.

The children stand patiently in line. On this first day of the holidays, the sun is shining. Wonderful August sunshine. Some have come accompanied by mothers or fathers. Many sit on the ground, deliberating about what they want to participate in. “Should I become a full citizen?” “Should I go straight to work or study first?” They fill out their Mini-Munich pass or read the rules. Rule number 10 states: “Whoever makes rules can also change them.” That is the job of the citizens’ assembly. There are already many rules and traditions, because Mini-Munich is taking place this summer of 2016 for the 18th time. Every two years, during the long school holidays. Some parents were themselves children here. Many of the supervisors at the construction yard, in the radio studio, or at the inn “The Fat Pig” are former participants.

It will be almost another hour until the doors open. Then the children will come storming in much the way they rushed out of school on the last day of term.

Quite a few have been here two or four years ago, or even more often. You must be seven years old and no older than fifteen. We hear from some that they persuaded their parents to go on holiday later so they could first come to Mini-Munich. And now they want to spend the first days of the holidays, or all three weeks, here from morning to evening, making things, going to the town hall, earning money, shopping whatever gets produced. There is a currency, the MiMü. And they manage their entire daily lives themselves. Parents are only admitted for half an hour, and that, as one already hears, is strictly enforced, with great enthusiasm and joy, by the children themselves. No school, no parents.

Mini-Munich has such an overwhelmingly good reputation among children that one simply has to take a closer look. We have already filmed a preparation day and will now be present every minute until the end of the three weeks. One thing is already clear: if you want to know what joyful anticipation looks like, you need to look at these faces right now.

I am still undecided whether the film will be more of a visionary look at the future of education, or a study of the self-evident. What should be self-evident has become anything but. There are alarming signs that children’s free play is as endangered as some natural habitats.

A glance to the side, before we look around inside the halls and on the open spaces outside. Perhaps it is a glimpse into a future that awaits us, or rather, one that we should prevent!

From the United States of America come reports that are hard to believe. For example, that in Californian parks the lower branches of trees are being sawn off so that children cannot climb them. The justification is liability and insurance. But above all, there is the fear that something could happen. Yes, of course something could happen if children climb trees. But what happens when nothing is allowed to happen?

Of all people, an economist, Nobel laureate Edmund Phelps from New York, fears that the American safety obsession, which is driving vitality out of schools and perhaps even more so out of family life, is not only weakening the creativity of children but stifling the inventive spirit of future adults. This, he argues, is leading to economic decline, and not just in the future. Phelps has already measured the stagnation in inventions and new ventures.

What happened there? The story of 14-year-old Ahmed Mohamed in Irving, Texas caused a stir. He was taken out of school by the police and brought to the station in handcuffs. The son of a Sudanese immigrant had built a clock and proudly brought it to school. The clock ticked and the teacher heard a time bomb.

The story of the Meitiv couple from Silver Spring in the suburbs of Washington also made its way through the media. They had let their six and ten year old children out onto the street unsupervised. Twice the children were stopped by police, most recently in a park. A resident had called the police after seeing the children for some time without adults. Proceedings were initiated against the parents on suspicion of neglect, as the Washington Post reported. All they wanted was for their children to have their own experiences. They were not thinking about violent crime or anything else that could happen.

Geography professor Roger Hart mapped children’s everyday movements in a small town in Vermont in 1972 and returned 32 years later. The range of children had shrunk enormously in that time. They rarely leave their parents’ houses and gardens anymore. Just as the experience of space has changed, so has the structure of time. Parents pick children up from school and schedule appointments for them with average time slots of one and a half to two hours. Then comes the next appointment. Gone are the small jobs in the neighborhood and errands. Nothing more on their own initiative. No scraped knees, no chalk drawings on the ground, no “Ready or not, here I come!”

Further research was carried out by Kyung Hee Kim. She speaks of a creativity crisis and notes a decline in children’s intelligence. The ability of children to produce “unique and unusual ideas” has been diminishing since 1990. Children are less energetic, less talkative, less humorous and less imaginative. They take less pleasure in connecting apparently irrelevant things and arriving at something new. For some time now these findings have been causing a scandal in the US. In Hanna Rosin’s book “The Overprotected Kid” many now read what they could see every day if they watched children. They spend more and more time with adults, talk like them and think like them: “But they are not developing the self-confidence to be independent and self-reliant.” For that they need above all other children. And security that comes from belonging. Security that comes from having weathered adventures and risks. Security that comes from being trusted.

Now we’re off. Ten o’clock sharp. The hall gates open. The children run. Some race to destinations they already know. There is the town hall and the craft workshops, the inn, the Comenius University and the bank and the employment office, also the garbage collection, theatre, cinema and TV station. 68 institutions. The children are mayors and taxi drivers, gardeners and university lecturers. There are markets and elections, rubbish collection campaigns and of course festivities. The embassy building is being designed this year by children from India, Japan, and European cities. Mini-Munich has inspired offshoots in those places. Central this year is climate protection, with a recycling yard and a research institute. 200 adults are the mentors: educators, artists, craftspeople, students and scientists, in short: truly grown-up adults, people from whom children learn firsthand about things and skills, that is, about the world they are so hungry for.

They rush into the halls to get to the particularly popular jobs. For example, taxi driver on soap-box-style vehicles. Or repairing taxis. Whoever then wants to work somewhere else hands in their notice, receives a paycheck that is cashed at the bank. The work card for that job goes to the employment office, where the jobs are advertised throughout the day.

Mini-Munich is both festival and everyday life. Nothing but festivities the whole time would be as hard to bear as nothing but everyday life. The kids come voluntarily. Compulsory fun would be something like a restaurant where you are forced to eat everything on your plate. Even with good food, eating disorders would soon spread.

Many children find their thing. Take one 14-year-old who last time wrote close to a hundred pages of legislation for the children’s republic. Where did he get that from? The children immerse themselves in topics. This time some have developed digital payment transactions, which they are introducing alongside the printed MiMü currency. Expert stuff. Children switch between their occupations. This is partly because they are looking for something they can get hooked on. But they do not switch constantly to the 45-minute rhythm of the timetable, as if the morning were a pro-ADHD training session.

Another glance to the side. In an age when pupils, and increasingly students too, are talking about binge-learning, it becomes important to look at environments where learning and doing are intertwined.

What does it mean to get hooked on something? How does that work? What would knowledge be without the driving force and without the fascination of the unknown? What would remain for curiosity and for the joy of learning, creating and transforming in a world that is already complete? And what happens when school and everyday life are so barren that kids rarely find anything to get hooked on, when there is no space for transformation because they are expected to just function, and then after many years of school do not know what they want?

That is the theme behind the theme of this already so lively and colourful event: how do children become fully alert and wholly present in an environment of exploration and doing? Which microstructures of learning, doing and enthusiasm can be observed there? We want to make these visible in the film. How do moments of hesitation and intensity alternate when unresolved questions give way to solutions? What happens with children when something truly significant is at stake for them? What rhythms of time and what kinds of choreography develop in tasks and in free cooperation? What role do the lecturers, experts and artists, that is the adults, play?

At the Comenius University, Ellen Fritsche teaches. She is a fan of Mini-Munich. Has been for years. She donates and is a “professor” there. Professors are those who give lectures or hold courses. Children, teenagers, professionals or someone like Ellen Fritsche do this. She is 88 years old and, without exaggeration, belongs in many respects among the youngest. She has been interested her entire life, since 1945 to be precise, in hands. She is also interested in much else. But when it comes to hands, her knowledge is enormous. And hands have remained for her an at least equally great mystery. She is not finished with hands. She has plenty to say about hands. Her enthusiasm and curiosity have not waned.

“We have 17,000 touch receptors in our hands.” The children are astonished. “But of course nobody can imagine that,” she adds straight away. That is why she has cut out small pieces of paper, one square centimetre in size, and handed them out to the children. “On one centimetre of fingertip there are 144 receptors.” That is easier to picture and therefore also to remember. Mrs Fritsche is a good teacher, though teaching was never her profession. She had founded a glove manufacturer.

Her hands are constantly in motion. She speaks not only about hands, she also speaks with them, explains what we use them for and what they express. In the womb this game already begins and for the baby the fingers are then the first toy. How wonderful that in this organ, activity and perception lie so close together. What would we be without hands? “You must try to imagine this,” she demands. Pause. Concentration and quiet. Alert, contemplative faces, and beautiful ones at that. Then she asks the children to feel their own pulse. “What, you feel nothing?” she asks in a powerful voice. “That is terrible, then you are dead.” But of course nobody here is dead. Nor appearing dead while alive, as children so often seem to in ordinary lessons. Ellen Fritsche is simply infectiously energising. She is reminiscent of Albert Einstein’s answer to the question of how he was able to figure out and discover so much. He said: because I have always remained the eternal child. Of course it is absolutely clear with Albert Einstein and with Ellen Fritsche that this eternal child has nothing to do with childishness. On the contrary. Successful adults, unlike the many who have grown confused, have not only developed their judgment, they offer this eternal child protection. They have not suppressed it. So they remain forever capable of being freshly wondering, great beginners. The more they know, the more questions they have. They are simply not finished. That is what makes an Ellen Fritsche or an Einstein so kindred with children. Children sense this kinship immediately. Children need such adults.

We are now a few days in. One morning around nine, on the way from the underground station to the Zenith halls, three children are jogging ahead of me, that childlike enthusiasm in their step. One glances at the time and says “there are still exactly 57 minutes, we can dawdle a bit more.” They slow their pace. The second, “no, the queues are always so long.” The third, “then let’s run.” The first again, “that way we save at most half a minute.” Then they are off again in that happy jog. Joyful anticipation in motion. Anticipation of the day, anticipation of experiences and anticipation of themselves.

Our first stop this time is the garden centre. The children carry baskets with plants out into the open, water them, explain to us which ones need the watering can with its spout, the young seedlings that is, and which ones are watered without it but with a gentle stream. Such proud expertise. At the construction yard, Little-Mini-Munich is taking shape. Here the children build houses, at first stalls, then more complex constructions. A carpenter is always on hand. A U-boat model is also being worked on. The stop-motion filmmakers need it. In the kitchen, potatoes are being mashed. Butter, quark and plenty of chives are added. It becomes a bread spread. The waiters try on their floor-length red aprons, take notepads and will later take orders, serve and take payment.

What is remarkable is the dedication of the children. Everyone finds their place, stays for a few hours, then moves on if they want to. Most of those in the kitchen want to stay there. Others also want a turn in the kitchen. Perhaps a topic for the citizens' assembly in the afternoon? However only full citizens can vote there. Full citizenship can be applied for after four hours of work, four hours of study and a “dispute resolution course.” There one learns not to let arguments escalate.

The constant: the children are present. They are truly there, with body and soul. In the fullest sense of that phrase. The sensitive body that thinks along with us is after all something other than the merely physical body. The children are not caught up in the frantic state of always doing one thing only to get to the next that is common in school and increasingly dominates society. That eternal treadmill on which one never truly arrives. Perhaps that is the strong gravitational pull of Mini-Munich: to do something consequential! To be needed in this cosmos! To find one’s place! The chance to simply be fully present! To find one’s thing, for a while, and then to keep searching and trying!

The beautiful thing, perhaps the most beautiful thing about Mini-Munich, is that the children have time. And the adults too. Most schools are contaminated by the fact that children and teenagers have no time and teachers none at all. The frequent boredom there does not contradict this diagnosis. Whoever is bored has lost touch with the world. That happens. One emerges from this deficiency when, from this zero point, one finds new facets of the world, perhaps even invents some. But boredom in school is not of that kind. It is the boredom of being unconnected, without the chance to form new bonds there, except those in the currency of school, the “subject matter.” But that is not the world.

Let us leave school aside, though of course when looking at Mini-Munich the comparison with it inevitably comes along. As an unbiased ethnologist from another continent one might perhaps find nothing particularly special about Mini-Munich. It would be a perfectly natural way of introducing children to life. One could consider Mini-Munich entirely self-evident, if in our surroundings it were not so scandalously far from self-evident. For that reason alone, the background hum of everyday school life, and of the years of life shaped by it, cannot simply be tuned out.

Adults in Mini-Munich often speak of the children being in a state of flow. What is this flow state? Complete absorption in an activity. Researchers like Mihály Csíkszentmihályi emphasise that task and problem-solving ability must be in balance. It is not about everything. It is about a clearly defined area. It is also not about me, for example about whether I am better or worse than someone else. It is about a field of action. And there is clear feedback. The activity is its own reward. Praise from outside has no or only minor significance.

The sociologist Richard Sennett has captured this in his great book on craftsmanship: “To do something for its own sake and to want to do it well.” For that there is little room and no time in the usual world where everything is a means to an end. Whatever is done there never quite suffices. In such a world, everything becomes a means or is put to use. And whatever is merely put to use is ultimately devalued. That is why children and adults alike so quickly become overwhelmed, sink into exhaustion, and complain in unison that they have no time.

With that we are back in the middle of Mini-Munich and among the children. We continually see children who are deeply absorbed in something. In the architecture studio, for example. Only moments ago they were outside measuring the plots on which houses are to be built. They were alert and agile. Now they are bent over paper transferring measurements, building scale models. A cupboard could fall over next to them and they would not even flinch. Neither the village square bustle nor a cameraman moving in close makes them look up. Maria Montessori called this the polarisation of attention.

The secret of Mini-Munich is that the things, the activities and the goals are themselves important and valuable. That is why many children do not want to go home at five o’clock, and come back the next morning to queue by the hundreds long before opening time.

Time at Mini-Munich passes quickly. Most striking is the attitude of the children. Their seemingly unbelievable attentiveness. Their intensity. Contrast this with school, where pupils mostly just sit, reduced to carrying a head around and being told to keep still, while here the children move freely and work together harmoniously, in an environment that calls on both body and mind. Not once did I hear the command “Quiet!” that week. Nor were any disciplinary problems noticeable. The children are not here merely to absorb and store information for later use. They are fully present. They are in the world. It is not handed to them second-hand. It is experienced through doing. Some former participants who met one afternoon noted that they had not seen a single child with a smartphone in their hand.

Mini-Munich is a laboratory of learning, thinking and doing and deserves to be understood as such. Because the children want to do things, they think, and in doing so they learn. Many, even in Munich, still think of this as a very lovely and rather elaborate holiday childcare provision. This is not childcare! Mini-Munich relates to school not as leisure relates to work, but more as the grammar of industrial society relates to that of a post-industrial society built around human activity. And that society is being shaped right here, which is what is so remarkable. One gets an idea of what a school could look like. One made of workshops, studios, practice rooms, also cafés and rooms of stillness. In such a school teachers would also be those who gather interesting people. They bring in experts, masters of their craft, ambassadors from the world of meaningful work, and lead the children out to interesting places. The school itself would be a base camp of society, a generative place where generations come together and create something new. How important the vitality and curiosity of children is for us adults! It would be a give and take.

The children encounter things, phenomena themselves. That is why they are so enthusiastic. They transform things. They call that work. And learning is taking things, experiences and knowledge and making them truly one's own. In the process, after only a few days, they have grown a head taller. I have heard this sentence many times, including from a journalist at the Bavarian Radio. She makes a daily radio programme “radioMikro” here with the children and brought along her son who is in first grade. At school, she says, he began more and more to get bored and was frustrated because he could no longer move freely as in kindergarten and do his own things. Here he is happy, busy, not bored, and after a few days he has “grown a head taller.”

And what comes out of it when children do their things, find their thing and keep pushing it further and further? The journalist herself was at Mini-Munich for the first time as an eight-year-old. There she first wanted to do nothing other than work in the kitchen “The Fat Pig.” “Just stirring the whole time.” In the following years other things were added. Finding one’s thing is not a linear or one-time affair. One would actually need to invent a new concept for it: positive traumatisation. Or simply: happiness.

Happiness? On the last day of Mini-Munich, Ellen Fritsche, the 88-year-old professor at the Comenius University, stood up from her cardboard stool. Earlier she had marched along in the closing parade of all the trades: a surreal parade that seemed as though it would never end, with for example the bicycle kitchen that had welded old bicycles into new ones, and the various groups from the recycling yard and research institute, and on and on. Here again, the most important and most beautiful thing was the faces of the children. Ellen Fritsche sits back down on her stool and leans against the wall of the hall. Next to her stands a cook, looking astonished. Not a cook from the “Fat Pig”, but from the kitchen for the 200 staff members. “Such a thing,” says the cook, “I have never seen. Such happiness!” And then Ellen Fritsche stands up and says in front of a rolling camera: “On the subject of happiness I want to say something to you. I had my car in the garage, but they were having trouble getting the spare part in time. But how, I said, should I then give my talk at Mini-Munich?” She takes a breath and swallows, as if holding back tears. “Then the garage owner came and said, what, Mini-Munich? My children were so happy there. Take my car and just go.”

This is not the normal pattern. Education projects in most countries are politically contested. Progressive educators and conservative parents rarely agree on what children should be doing, let alone how public money should be spent on it. Mini-Munich is different. Not because it is bland or inoffensive, but because it is rich enough that people across the political spectrum can look at it and find what they care about most.

What a libertarian sees. Children in Mini-Munich choose their own work. No one assigns them a job. If they dislike a job, they quit and find another one. Children who want to start a business can do so. There is a market where goods made in the workshops are sold at prices set by the sellers. There is a stock exchange. The currency is earned and spent through voluntary transactions. The entire experience is an exercise in individual agency and voluntary exchange.

What a civic republican sees. The same city has a mayor, a city council, courts, and tax collection. Children elect their representatives. They pass laws. They debate whether to establish a police force, and when they do, and it goes badly, they abolish it through a legitimate political process. The newspaper and TV station hold institutions accountable. The court adjudicates disputes.

What a progressive educator sees. There are no grades, no curricula, no standardized tests. Children learn by doing, not by sitting. A child working in the newspaper learns to write because the readers will complain if the article is incomprehensible. A child in the kitchen learns about hygiene because a snail turning up in the salad leads to a public scandal and an appearance on the evening news. Motivation is intrinsic. Feedback comes from natural consequences, not from teachers with red pens. Children of different ages work side by side, and the hierarchy is based on competence, not age.

What a conservative sees. Children in Mini-Munich take on real responsibility. They have to show up on time because the newspaper has a print deadline and the bakery has customers waiting. They handle money, fulfill contracts, deal with scarcity. The adult counselors are skilled craftspeople who can actually do glassblowing, carpentry, and basket weaving, and the children sense this competence immediately and respect it. The products made in the workshops are real and must be of sufficient quality to be sold.

The reason Mini-Munich appeals across these lines is that it contains markets and governments, individual freedom and public institutions, craft and creativity, competition and cooperation, all at once. The parts that any given observer finds most salient say more about the observer than about the city.

The objections, where they exist, come from the extremes. From the far left, the complaint is that Mini-Munich trains children for capitalism: they earn wages, pay taxes, sell goods for profit, and learn to treat money as the medium through which the city operates. A child who spends three weeks working for a currency, saving it, and spending it in a marketplace is being socialized into an economic order that some would rather see dismantled than rehearsed. From the far right, the complaint centers not on economics but on authority: children have too much freedom, too much say in how things are run. They elect their own government, pass their own laws, and can overrule decisions made by adults. A city where ten-year-olds abolish the police force and no adult intervenes is, for some, not empowerment but anarchist disorder.

Everyone else can find something to admire. And they would all be right.

But almost nothing about this tradition has been available in English. The handbook on creating your own miniature city, the essays, and practical guides written by the people who built and ran these cities, exist only in German. The result is that the concept of miniature cities, tested and refined over more than forty years, remains invisible to the English-speaking world.

minicities.org exists to change that.

What we do

We translate. The most important German-language texts on miniature cities (books, essays, institutional reports) will be translated into English. When Reinhard Kahl wrote about Mini-Munich while filming a documentary about it, or when Gerd Grüneisl and Wolfgang Zacharias published their 400-page-long account of how Mini-Munich was organized and what worked and what didn’t, no one outside the German-speaking world could read it.

We write. Original essays that analyze how miniature cities work, what makes them succeed or fail, and how they compare to other attempts at children’s education. We also encourage others to write about miniature cities in different publications, and will provide the necessary information and quotes to them. If you are interested in writing a guest post here on minicities.org, reach out. There is no shortage of angles worth exploring: miniature cities as seen through the lens of John Dewey, or Ivan Illich, or John Taylor Gatto; the historical predecessors, like the George Junior Republic; comparisons to Montessori, Sudbury, or forest schools; the economics, the governance, the architecture. We are happy to hear from educators, urbanists, researchers, parents, and anyone else with something to say.

We conduct research. This summer, we intend to conduct surveys in miniature cities to study what children actually gain from the experience. Do children who spend two or three weeks in a miniature city develop a better understanding of economic and political concepts? How do their job preferences change? From “influencer” to “architect”? Does their sense of agency, the belief that their own actions can affect the world around them, shift in measurable ways? There is abundant anecdotal evidence that miniature cities are formative. There is very little quantitative evidence. We want to start producing some.

We want to make it easier to build one. Running a miniature city is logistically demanding. It requires space, materials, skilled adult counselors, a governance structure, a currency system, and a plan for how institutions relate to one another. Much of this knowledge currently lives in the heads of a small number of experienced organizers. We are working toward practical guides, templates, and resources that reduce the friction involved in setting up a miniature city, whether temporary or permanent.

We explore what it would take to run a miniature city permanently. Every miniature city that exists today is a temporary program, a few weeks in the summer, then gone. The question of whether a miniature city can operate year-round, retaining what makes it attractive while solving the problems of funding, staffing, and the children eventually outgrowing it, is one we take seriously. If it can be done, it may be the most consequential thing a miniature city could become.

We raise and distribute funds. We will accept donations that support the work described above: translations, original research, surveys, and the development of practical resources. We also plan to re-grant funds to miniature cities around the world.

Why this matters

The premise behind miniature cities is simple and, once you see it, hard to dismiss: children are capable of far more than we let them do. Not in the abstract, motivational-poster sense, but in the concrete sense that a ten-year-old can run a newspaper on a deadline, work in a beauty salon, adjudicate disputes in a court, sit on a city council and establish and then abolish a police force when it turns out to cause more problems than it solves.

The conventional approach to preparing children for adult life is to keep them away from it. Miniature cities take the opposite approach.

This is not a new idea. It has been working, quietly, in Germany and Austria for over four decades. minicities.org intends to make it visible to everyone else.

Some miniature cities are exactly that. But for a miniature city to retain its attractiveness over time, it has to interact with the world around it. And not just through field trips, but as a routine feature of civic and economic life. The question is how.

Bringing the city in

The simplest way to do that is by invitation. The city council of a miniature city can invite their counterparts from the actual municipal government. Not to give a speech to a forcibly assembled audience of children, which is the school model, but to attend a city council session as guests, answer questions from councillors who are ten years old, and discover that the questions are unexpectedly precise. The mayor visits — and is received by a mayor. All these encounters can happen on something closer to equal footing than either side expects.

The same logic applies across institutions. The miniature newspaper invites a journalist from the local newspaper to sit in the editorial office for an afternoon, not to lecture on journalism but to work alongside the children. The theatre invites an actor — not necessarily a famous one, though fame helps — to perform or to direct a short piece with the ensemble that has been rehearsing all week. The architecture studio invites a practicing architect to judge a design competition. A moderator from the city’s television station co-hosts the evening news broadcast with the thirteen-year-old anchor.

Some of the most memorable moments involve physical spectacle. A fire engine arrives in the miniature city. Firefighters show their equipment, explain what they do, let children handle the hose. A patrol car pulls up. An ambulance.

Sending the city out

Traffic flows the other direction too. A reporting team from the newspaper goes out into the real city to cover a story: a new restaurant opening, a film screening, a local election. They return with material that is edited and then published in the newspaper. The television crew films an interview at a nearby park and broadcasts it that evening. Children working in the architecture studio visit a building under construction and come back with new ideas for their own work.

These excursions are not field trips in the school sense, organized by adults for educational enrichment. Children go out because the newspaper needs content or the architecture studio needs reference material. The child who visits a bakery does so because she might work in the miniature city’s kitchen and wants to understand how sourdough is scored before baking. The motive is professional, even if the profession is temporary and the professional is eleven.

When the boundary becomes porous

All of this — inviting guests, sending out reporters — is possible even in a miniature city that runs for only a few days or weeks. But something more interesting happens when the city operates over a longer period: months rather than weeks, or even, in the most ambitious version, permanently.

The difficulty with any long-running miniature city is that its internal workings eventually become predictable. Writing the city newspaper is absorbing for a week or two. So is working in the bakery, the architecture studio, the workshops. A child can switch jobs, and most do, but by week four or five the city itself has been explored. The institutions are familiar, the customer requests are the same, the jobs have been mastered. Mastery without new challenge becomes monotony.

The natural solution is to make the boundary between the miniature city and the adult world deliberately porous. The newspaper, initially written for the city itself, gradually expands its coverage and readership into the surrounding town — adults now pay real money for it. A bakery that once fed only the miniature city’s inhabitants starts selling bread to parents who come to pick up their children and discover that the sourdough is actually good. A design studio takes commissions from local businesses. A carpentry workshop builds bookshelves for paying customers.

For the children of such a city, the miniature city eventually becomes a base rather than a destination — a place where materials, equipment, and expertise are available, and where colleagues and deadlines hold you accountable. From that base, children go out into the adult world: to report, to deliver, to sell, to learn.

The university without walls

The academic dimension follows the same pattern. A lecture hall open throughout the day, not compulsory, not graded, where anyone who knows something can speak about it. An invited plumber from town explains pipe fitting. A biologist talks about the frogs in the nearby pond. A twelve-year-old who discovered Fermi estimates gives a lecture on how to estimate the number of piano tuners in Munich.

Children attend when something interests them, skip when it does not, and often show up because something in their work has raised a question. A child in a workshop, commissioned to build a two-metre-tall Trojan horse for the theatre, gets curious about who the Greeks and Trojans actually were. A child who wants to participate in the stock exchange sits in on a talk about percentages and compound interest. The distinction between teacher and student is determined not by age but by who currently knows more about the subject at hand.

The point

A common critique of miniature cities is that they are, in the end, just elaborate pretending: an insular world whose resemblance to real life is only aesthetic, without any of the underlying logic. That they are keeping children away from real life rather than bringing them closer to it. And for a place like KidZania, where children rotate through scripted roles with no connection to one another or to anything outside, the critique is fair.

But a miniature city whose boundary to the adult world is deliberately porous is something different. It brings real life closer. The city acts as scaffolding. Children first do work in the miniature city for the miniature city: writing for a readership of other children, baking for the other children, building the scenery of the theatre in the workshops. As they grow more competent and ambitious, the work extends outward: the newspaper reaches adult readers, the bakery serves parents, the commissions come from local firms. The structure supports them until they no longer need it and decide it’s time to set up their own shop.

Without that porosity, a miniature city is destined to remain a summer program: absorbing for a few weeks, then outgrown. With it, the miniature city becomes something that can run permanently.

Both have streets, storefronts, jobs, and a local currency. But they are built on opposing assumptions about what children are capable of. One treats children as consumers of scripted activities; the other lets them participate in a city whose parts depend on one another and is malleable to their actions.

KidZania, founded in Mexico City in 1999 and now in around thirty countries, is a polished commercial operation. Corporate partners fund branded workplaces (banks, hospitals, restaurants) and children rotate through them in fifteen-to-thirty-minute slots. They enter a workplace, follow a pre-choreographed sequence of steps, collect their wages, and exit. The production values are impressive. But nothing connects to anything else. Goods made in workshops aren’t sold in the department store. The newspaper doesn’t run ads for other businesses. It has the aesthetic of interdependence, the streets, the storefronts, the uniforms, without any of its logic.

This is less a design failure than a consequence of what KidZania is. Scripted, time-boxed activities are after all a sensible way to run a throughput-based attraction where large numbers of children rotate daily through a fixed set of “jobs”. Allowing a child to stay at a sought-after job all afternoon because she is genuinely absorbed would be operationally catastrophic: it blocks every other child from that slot. The model that would actually deepen learning — open-ended time, children finding novel ways to do the job — directly undermines the model that makes the business viable.

Mini-Munich, organized by a group of Munich cultural pedagogues since 1979 as a three-week-long summer program, is built on the opposite premise: that a city only becomes real when it responds to what its inhabitants do.

What this means in practice is that the city functions as a social order rather than a collection of separate activities. The newspaper has a deadline. It must be finished by five o’clock for it to be printed and sold before the children go home in the evening. Children in the editorial office decide what to write about, set rates for ads, invent new sections, and type the copy themselves while reporters return from assignments across the city. When something goes wrong in the kitchen — a snail turns up in the salad because the lettuce was not washed properly — it is in the newspaper that evening, and three people from the kitchen are in the TV studio the next day being grilled by the news anchor.

The workshops follow the same logic. Children make real things, briefcases, baskets, jewelry, pottery, glassblown objects, which they can sell on the market or in the department store. The advertising agency designs flyers and posters commissioned by other enterprises. If the text is confusing or the work isn't finished by the deadline, the enterprise that commissioned it complains and may not pay the contract value, leading to a conflict that ends up in court. An architecture studio designs a façade for another enterprise; a workshop then builds it. Decisions in one part of the city create needs and problems in others. The institutions are not performing city life; they are, in a reduced and somewhat simplified form, living it.

Governance is real in the same way. Children elect their mayor and city council, pass laws in citizens’ assemblies, and sit at the city court. In 1985, the city council introduced a police force. Various incidents led the same council to abolish it. Children who wanted a stock exchange built one. Children who wanted to strike organized one and lived with the consequences. If a child wants to introduce something that does not yet exist, there is room for it, though it requires their own initiative, just as it would in the real world.

The two miniature cities also differ in their appeal depending on the age of the children. KidZania is most appealing between five and ten: dressing up as a pilot or a doctor and following a script is genuinely exciting at that age. But the experience has a low ceiling. By eleven, the scripted roles feel babyish. There is nothing to master, nothing to deepen, no reason to return. The very features that make KidZania accessible to a six-year-old — the short activities, the clear instructions, the guaranteed outcomes — are what make it hollow to an eleven-year-old.

Mini-Munich’s age curve runs almost in reverse. For a six-year-old, the city is exciting but somewhat overwhelming. It becomes most interesting around nine, ten, eleven, and twelve, when children are sophisticated enough to understand the interplay between institutions and hold positions of real responsibility. Some stayed for weeks at the same job, not repeating the same experience but developing it further, doing things the organizers had not anticipated. And because Mini-Munich runs for weeks at a time, children who return after a brief absence find a city that has changed: laws had been passed, businesses had opened and failed, scandals had been debated and half-forgotten. A child who spent two weeks writing for the newspaper could run for city council in week three on the basis of a public reputation she had actually built.

KidZania is commercially sustainable but thin to inhabit — impressive to look at, entertaining for a few hours, incapable of accommodating genuine agency because the environment is a commercial product whose parameters cannot be renegotiated by the children. Mini-Munich is rich and formative, but runs for three weeks every two years on municipal grants that have to be argued for each cycle. Its survival depends entirely on the goodwill of local authorities and the endurance of a small team of pedagogues.

The open question is whether anything can exist between these two poles: commercially viable enough to run year-round, but philosophically closer to Mini-Munich than to KidZania. If it can, we may have found what the school of tomorrow will look like.

First published in ‘Die Kinderstadt: Eine Schule des Lebens’, Gerd Grüneisl and Wolfgang Zacharias (1989). English translation by Daniel Fetz.

Children behind bank counters, in city councils, as mayors, as newspaper and television editors, as employees in registration offices, as workers in a furniture workshop, in a stonemason’s workshop – naturally, none of that is possible. They lack all the prerequisites, we think. Not just in ability, but also in seriousness, in accountability, in responsibility. And besides, child labor is forbidden, in their own interest, as we like to say. And so we let them grow up in the children’s ghetto, let them dream of what will happen “when I grow up someday.” They remain, as if it were only natural, locked out of the serious realities of life – immature, in need of supervision, not to be taken seriously.

And for a long time, adults also projected their ideals onto this sheltered realm; in different periods, childhood became a faithful reflection of adult longings: be it the longing for an idyll of purity and blissful harmony with oneself and the world, unburdened by any hardship; be it the longing for the pure, unalloyed expression of idealized masculinity or femininity – here the boy playing war games or tinkering with machines, there the little doll-mother at her toy kitchen; here the brave, battle-hungry lad who devours adventure books – there the tender, affection-seeking girl, groomed for beauty, who reads “Trotzkopf” and learns nothing of the men’s world. The history of childhood over the last 200 years is a history of the exclusion of childhood from adult life. Nowhere is this more evident today than in the so-called children’s playgrounds – here the little ones are allowed, often behind fences, to romp around on the playground equipment and in sandboxes that have been carefully prepared and approved as age-appropriate. Adults are forbidden to use them. Here children perform a kind of duty – “play officials,” as someone has called them.

Of course, with this seemingly unavoidable exclusion, we have also maneuvered ourselves into a difficult situation – and one that becomes clearer to us from year to year. For they are supposed to grow up after all. How can one prepare someone for something when you systematically lock them out of it?

To take the sting out of this contradiction, a whole range of children's activities were invented and imposed that have something of the squaring of the circle about them: they keep children away from real life and at the same time prepare them for it, or so it is said. The most famous of these inventions is compulsory schooling – spatially and temporally isolated from the world, this same world is then conveyed in small doses as so-called course material that one must absorb while sitting, listening, writing, reading, and answering. And this happens along a carefully planned and mapped-out obstacle course that also goes by the name of curriculum or lesson plan – it is driven by parents and teachers who never tire of emphasizing the importance of this rather monotonous procedure for later life. And these periods of formal schooling now extend for more and more people deep into the third decade of life, and they now begin as early as preschool.

Naturally, alongside school there are also all kinds of substitute measures for the life still to come – after all, you can’t simply put children on hold until they are grown up. There remains something disruptive about them, and one must somehow keep them busy to pass the time. The shop window of any toy store displays phantoms of the adult world in abundance, phantoms on which children’s fantasies are supposed to feast. And alongside children’s encyclopedias and children’s books, the media are extremely active in keeping children engaged, offering a peculiar pseudo-participation in the adult world to anyone willing to be drawn in. It even got to the point that authors like Postman (1983), in response to children – and the adult world as well – being flooded by flickering television images, put forward the thesis that the distinction between child and adult was fading. Because both groups were killing time in the same ways, because both were relying on the same sources of information.

However: There can be no doubt about the exclusion of childhood from responsible and conflict-filled adult life. And this state of affairs remains problematic. The more thoroughly the media penetrate every pore of children’s lives, the more built-up and car-dominant the environment becomes, the more eagerly educators search for opportunities where children can still do something serious, where they encounter realities rather than media phantoms and can feel that their own actions matter and have consequences for real life. Here lie the roots of initiatives for so-called “practical learning”; in schools, practical work projects are being tried in which the outcome is something other than papers filled with writing and school grades. Here a pizza oven is built and put to use, there an ecological school garden is created out of a green field. Here environmental research institutes offer “research visits” for students, there various “Olympiads” in mathematics and the natural sciences are promoted. There seems to be a widespread willingness to take the next generation one step further out of the illusory world of school and childhood.

And yet: Even when adolescents are allowed to get a little involved in political issues, write letters to the editor, and reenact political debates in the classroom with assigned roles, only a narrow crack opens onto so-called real life; and despite all good intentions, much of it feels like a pedagogically strained substitute. Money and power stay outside. The educators seem compelled to make sure the involvement doesn’t get too serious.

How, against this background, should one assess “The City of Children,” which existed and pulsed for five weeks in the summer of 1988 in a hall in Munich’s Olympic Park? What there was to see, to hear, to touch, to do, to talk about – it considerably upset the ingrained expectations regarding pedagogically arranged children’s activities. Was it illusion? Was it reality? The certainties in one’s assessment began to waver after just a few hours of involvement in it.

There sit children behind the counters of an employment office, issuing work permits, matching other children with jobs, managing scarcity, and grappling with directives from the city administration; right next to them sit others in the bank, checking permits and paying out the city’s own currency as wages for work done in the city – money that can then be used to buy food, newspapers, event tickets, taxi rides, handicraft products, etc.; children work in workshops where usable, saleable objects are produced (under the guidance of adult counselors skilled in the crafts). I recall briefcases, baskets, jewelry brooches, pottery, glassblown items, woven fabrics, stonework. Children work in a newspaper editorial office where hectic activity breaks out around midday – because the newspaper must be finished by 5 PM; on 10 typewriters, articles, advertisements, news items, and letters to the editor are typed. Children are out with television crews gathering material for the daily news show, which is broadcast daily at 5 PM in the screening room, presented by an elegantly self-assured thirteen-year-old anchor; the recorded material is reviewed and edited in the studio. In the city council assembly, the delegates struggle with a large agenda (Do we need a police force? Are the newspaper editors to be relieved of the obligation to attend university courses? Should there be a street named after Georg Kronawitter, the Munich Lord Mayor who was so noble as to open Mini-Munich with real TV coverage?)

Children also sit at the overburdened administrative offices of this remarkable city: at the registration office, where every child who wants to work and live in the city must register, and, as mentioned, at the employment office, in front of whose counters there are usually long lines. That is where the so-called work cards are issued, entitling their holders to work at a particular job for one day. Although the list of professions was long, actual openings were scarce on the days of my visit. In terms of professions, Mini-Munich had quite a lot to offer: furniture maker, city guide, architect, city gardener, computer expert, cook, glassblower, postal worker, museum curator, actor, garbage collector, auto mechanic, parent counselor, taxi driver, etc. On the work card, once the work is completed, the hours worked are recorded: the hourly wage is 5 MiMüs (the city currency), 1 MiMü tax deduction. Upon returning the card, the wages are paid out – at the bank, in front of whose counters there were always lines as well. Once a week, city council members and mayors are elected by the citizens’ assembly.

A major role in Mini-Munich is played not by the school, but by the university, which has a beautiful lecture hall with elegant seating: you can tell from the space that what happens there is considered important and is not regarded as superfluous academic drudgery. Participation in courses is compensated with the same wage as other work. Parents, adults who roam the city, children, counselors – they can all offer courses for an honorarium of 8 MiMüs per hour! And about interesting topics – S.R., 15 years old, advertises for lecturers in the newspaper: “Any hobby, almost any topic will be accepted (nothing too boring like, e.g., poetry analysis or the like)”; MiMüZ, Issue 4, July/August 1988. One can only become a full citizen after completing a certain number of university course hours. Here are some course topics I noted down: juggling for beginners, first aid, massage, jazz dance, self-defense, photography course, art in Bavaria, acting school. Other cultural institutions: the museum, which had prepared a shoebox exhibition (the challenge was to create a stimulating arrangement inside a shoebox); the theater (with a perfect stage and richly stocked props and costume room)...

Perhaps the reader is thinking, with some impatience and skepticism, during this enumeration: What kind of fantasy world is actually being described here? How is all this possible – in the limited space of a hall? How is it supposed to work – with these critical youngsters, who are supposedly so skeptical that they see through any pretense?

And I confess, the same questions would have occurred to me had I not experienced this city in action for two days. And another question will impose itself on the reader of such a pale account: Even if all this somehow works – isn’t it ultimately a pedagogical Pied Piper scheme designed to drive out children’s last remaining sense of reality? After all, between 1,000 and 2,000 children come there daily of their own free will to make Mini-Munich into their city. So is this the ultimate form of children’s ghetto, or does it open a way out of that ghetto? Is Mini-Munich emptying the last squares and streets of Munich where children could still roam freely – in order to draw them into a pedagogically contrived event? No easy question – no question with an indisputable answer; a question in which the whole difficulty of our dealings with children is reflected, ever since the idyll of childhood and the retreat into a life of nature remote from society, which we long equated with children’s holiday happiness, came to an end.

The unique initiative of the Munich Pedagogical Action is based on two ideas:

1. It should surely be possible not to teach children about a world distant from them, or to bring them into contact with it only through toy and television phantoms in a sham way; it should surely be possible to involve them actively in a social reality that they create and maintain day by day according to transparent and agreed-upon rules of play, and that they can control or change through something like a public sphere in which debate unfolds and information circulates. It should surely be possible to invent and create a social fabric that holds together the activities fragmented in children’s daily routine (just think of the terror of today’s leisure schedules for children!) so that a manageable, reasonable context of action emerges from the externally controlled chaos.

2. It should be possible to acknowledge and bring to bear the forces in children that normal education tends to undervalue or relegate to the realm of the most trivial children’s entertainment: the forces of imagination ignited by tangible objects and events; the forces of identification that let them easily slip into unfamiliar roles – the potentials, then, that schooling fixated on concept-oriented learning still treats as something that doesn't truly matter when it comes to practical competence in life or even capacity for academic study.

The passion children have for turning themselves into others, and for transforming objects, places, activities through a magic stroke of imagination – this passion need not necessarily lead away from reality. Eight-year-old Andreas with the red cap on his head and the (real) garbage bin on wheels is one of the sanitation workers on duty, dispatched by the cleaning department onto the city’s streets. And by the power of assuming this role, which he takes very seriously, he will develop a different awareness of the dirt on streets and the problems of street cleaning than even the most astute and vivid school lessons could achieve. The staff of the advertising office, where all advertisements must be registered, also create slogans and billboards on behalf of various institutions (the theater, the museum, the city gardening department). They grapple with questions of quality, even with disputes — and through playful action they come to understand and judge such matters far more than any classroom instruction that merely analyzes advertising texts could ever accomplish. And children who are constantly bombarded with survey results in the media have a good chance of becoming somewhat more discerning once they have stepped into the role of researchers in Mini-Munich and surveyed many passers-by on the street – for example, about what they think of the heat in the hall (”unbearable,” “refreshing,” “still okay,” “driving me crazy,” “way too hot” – as reported in Issue 4 of MiMüZ = Mini-Munich Newspaper 1988).

And when one considers the effort it often takes to get children to write in school contexts – they mostly do it only because it is assigned and prescribed – one may be astonished at how much and how passionately writing takes place in Mini-Munich: the city council page in the newspaper contains the minutes of the public city council meeting from the previous day (24 agenda items); minutes of the citizens’ assembly appear in the same issue. What is striking is the seriousness and attentiveness of the minute-takers.

Everywhere, the imagination of those who take on roles becomes the medium through which they playfully come to know the features of the serious adult world surrounding them. And the whole body is always involved, never just the writing hand, while the body on the school bench is kept still. And mistakes are never pointed out through red marks and grades – always through the consequences of actions, through protests and objections of others who feel, for example, poorly, incorrectly, or incomprehensibly informed.

Yet another example of the characteristic mixture of fantasy and reality that has such an enlivening effect on the actors of Mini-Munich, in ways one could never have designed at a drawing board: the fourteen-year-old female Lord Mayor sits on the prominently elevated Lord Mayor’s chair in the beautiful city hall (the Theatine Church and Frauenkirche are painted on the back wall like a stage set) and presides, while (on August 3, 1988, at 3 PM) the architect and caricaturist E. M. Lang gives opening remarks for the architecture competition (”What is my vision for the city of tomorrow?”). So this is by no means a children’s paradise completely sealed off from the real Munich. Lang reports on real problems, real initiatives. The serious world is repeatedly brought in – a remarkable balance that can be demonstrated through many examples from these five weeks of city life.

The underlying question, which all similar projects of cultural work with young people must face, is: How does Mini-Munich prevent the imagination from running wild and growing out of control (as indeed happens in some leisure paradises, which obviously succumb to the danger of infantilization)?

A substantial dose of seriousness and commitment has been mixed into this play through various means. It is not about a loose, disconnected sequence of didactically tinged children’s leisure amusements. The employment and compensation rules are binding, as are the rules for participation in civic rights. Not everyone can do whatever they want for as long as they want – given the scarcity of jobs, that is obvious. The seriousness and sense of commitment that mark these activities also depend on the stimulating, guiding, advising, helping presence of approximately fifty adult counselors in the workshops, offices, editorial rooms, and cultural venues. They are available and can be called upon by the children. They guide things so that presentable and usable products are created – in basket weaving, furniture making, television production, in the computer room, in the city gardening department, in the pottery workshop, in the theater. The counselors can do what they show and teach the children at their request – and children evidently sense this real competence immediately, and they join in. Finally, besides the binding rules and the competent people, there is a third resource of seriousness to mention: the materials, the equipment are “real.” These are not mock-ups for pedagogical purposes: real television equipment, real computers, a real glassblowing workshop; weatherproof huts whose roofs must actually keep out the rain are built; a serious stage with real spotlights – all of this demands careful handling. Anyone who works with these devices and materials knows from the outset that they are being taken seriously.

And on top of all this comes the scrutiny exercised by the city’s public sphere, which is ceaselessly supplied with material for discussion by newspapers, television, bulletin boards, and research activities. If something goes wrong in the kitchen, for example (a snail in the salad, due to careless salad washing) – then it can be in the newspaper that evening – and three people from the kitchen are in the television studio the next day to answer the news anchor’s questions...

In the ten hours that I roamed this children’s city over two days, I saw nothing of what makes our schools so difficult: no rowdiness and yelling, no petty games of aggression that betray boredom and weariness, feelings of uselessness; no admonitions and warnings, no urging to work, no threats. And that is saying something given the presence of over 1,000 children between the ages of 6 and 14 in a single hall. Cheerful activity, certainly also turbulence, confusion, and exhaustion – but not a trace of paralyzing passivity and indifference. Anyone who has heard the complaints about children who can no longer concentrate, who are no longer interested in anything because they – over-informed – already believe they know everything, may be astonished at the seriousness and concentration in these faces and gestures; at the will to do something sensible themselves and to help sustain and co-produce this social fabric.

And with all the seriousness: this city, even in its physical design, also has something of a grand spectacle, a theater about it. Actors on the stage of Mini-Munich. Also great fun. Enough fun that reality doesn’t become deadly serious and crushing; enough seriousness that the surplus of fun doesn’t become childish.

Anyone who has a sense of the barrenness of our pedagogical landscape may consider this Mini-Munich, in which open, unplanned life is coaxed forth and encouraged, to be improbable to the point of impossible. Anyone who dismisses it as mere fun and games has either not looked closely enough, or else is acting out of self-defense – because they sense a threat to cherished, if questionable, traditions of dealing with young people.

This is not a miracle. It is skilled pedagogical work: devising and creating an environment that entices children to engage with it. An environment that has fantastical features and yet does not lead away from the “real world,” but on the contrary brings the real world into immediate, personal proximity, in a way entirely different from school instruction or media consumption.