Hans Maeder

Karl Hans Maeder ( born December 29, 1909 in Hamburg, † September 8, 1988 in Manhattan) was an American educator and founder of German origin educational reform -oriented Stockbridge School in Stockbridge, Massachusetts.

Life

When Hans Karl Mäder he was born in 1909 in Hamburg, the third child of a wealthy family. At 18, he left home to become a teacher - against the wishes of his father who wanted to see him in his footsteps as a businessman. He described his father as an authoritarian nationalists and anti-Semites, who hailed Hitler.

He himself - an avowed socialist - became involved early on in the anti-fascist resistance .. To avoid arrest, he fled in 1933 to Denmark, where he first got a job in a home for emotionally disturbed boys During this time he also began anti-fascist publications to write. In 1937 he had to leave Denmark; he made his way through Kenya, Hong Kong, Singapore and the Philippines to Hawaii, where he was arrested December 8, 1941 due to his German nationality and interned until February 23, 1943.

A first work was Maeder at the YMCA in New York City borough of Brooklyn. In September 1944 he was given a one year employment as a German teacher at the Windsor Mountain School in Lenox (Massachusetts), then at the Walden School in New York, where he 1947/48, the school board held. Here he also met his future wife, Ruth, the widowed mother of a student.

The Stockbridge School

1948 acquired the Maeders for $ 60,000 a spacious property at the foot of West Stockbridge Mountain in Massachusetts and founded her own school, the Stockbridge School - conceived from his own experience of nationalism, racial hatred and anti-Semitism of the Emigrant Maeder it as a reform- pedagogical oriented boarding school without segregation and without denominational loyalty. Quick he managed to recruit an international student body. In general, much emphasis was placed on an intercultural education - for this purpose a separate branch school in Corcelles in Switzerland was operated for several years, in which the students were able to complete a year abroad. Significantly was that as early as 1948, the flag of the fledgling United Nations organization was hoisted at the school building.

Among the most famous graduate of Stockbridge School include Arlo Guthrie, Chevy Chase and Benjamin Barber.

The school had to be closed due to financial difficulties in 1976. The now based on the grounds DeSisto at Stockbridge School has on their orientation ago no relation to the "old " Stockbridge School.

Hans Maeder had retired in 1971 from the management of the school; moved to New York, he was until his death in 1988 as an expert on educational issues.