I go to the Elisabeth Selbert comprehensive school!
For twenty years our school was called “Gesamtschule Bonn-Bad Godesberg”. From now on it will be called “Elisabeth Selbert Comprehensive School”.
Why have a name at all?
A name stands for values that we consciously decide for when we choose this name. The identification of the staff and students with their school is important because they perceive it as their own and not as an anonymous institution that is foreign to them. Only when they make the school their school will they also commit themselves to their school. A name creates orientation, and a name allows a sense of unity to develop better.
Why a name after twenty years?
It’s a good time to take stock. The years of construction are over. A name can be used to express where the school is today and what direction it will take in the future.
Why Elisabeth Selbert?
“Men and women have equal rights” – this sentence would not be in our constitution today if she, one of the four “mothers of the Basic Law”, had not stubbornly fought for it in the Parliamentary Council in 1948/49. Their application was rejected twice, and Article 3 of the Basic Law was only passed under pressure from the public, which Selbert mobilized.
Elisabeth Selbert represents our school in several respects.
“It is a fundamental error to assume equality when it comes to equality. Equality is based on the equivalence that recognizes difference.”
Selbert, Elisabeth: Second reading in Main Committee on January 18, 1949. – Quoted from Böttger, Barbara: The right to equality and difference. Elisabeth Selbert and the women’s fight for Article 3 II of the Basic Law. Münster 1990. P.218.
Your understanding of equality is the linchpin of our educational work. She was a person for whom education played a major role. She spared no effort and effort to achieve her doctorate through second-chance education and with considerable effort.
She had to overcome financial hurdles, experience discrimination as a girl, and deal with massive prejudices against female students, all at a time marked by political unrest and economic crises.
It also stands for the Basic Law as a whole, which was discussed and passed in Bonn in the König Museum and in the Pedagogical Academy (later the Federal Palace). The democratic and constitutional development of the Federal Republic of Germany after National Socialism was a central concern for her. We see making the values of the Basic Law our own and bringing them to life as an important educational task.
With Elisabeth Selbert, we chose a woman as our namesake who is not yet well known, but deserves to be better known. We are also setting an example in the Bonn school landscape, because women’s names are still mercilessly underrepresented among school names.
What particularly distinguished Elisabeth Selbert was her fearless and practical stubbornness. This fits well with a school that writes moral courage, if not on its flags, then at least on its entrance signs.
(KS)
The lecture by the author and Selbert biographer Antje Dertinger on the occasion of the ceremony for the school’s name change on March 22, 2012 can be found here.
