Above the entrance of a high school in Renningen, Germany, a promise is carved in large letters: School without Racism – School with Courage. Inside, that promise is put to the test every single day.
On a cold January morning, 10th- and 11th-grade students moved through workshops on racism, bystander intervention, and sexualized violence as part of a "Day of Courage" — not a one-time awareness campaign, but part of a sustained effort to weave anti-discrimination into the fabric of everyday school life. In one workshop, students taught each other about microaggressions and "othering," using real examples to show how racism operates in subtle, often invisible ways. In another, actors staged tense, realistic scenarios — a racist remark on a bus, a confrontation in public — and asked students to step in and respond. After each scene, the group paused to analyze what worked, what was risky, what they would do differently. The lesson was simple but hard-won: intervening is difficult, but it can be practiced.
This work happens inside Schule ohne Rassismus – Schule mit Courage, Germany's largest school network, which now reaches 2.5 million students across more than 5,000 schools nationwide. Founded in 1995, the network grew from an earlier organization, Aktion Courage, established in 1992 in response to racist attacks on Turkish immigrants in Germany. The network's premise is straightforward: any school can join if at least 70 percent of its students, teachers, and staff formally commit to opposing discrimination and addressing incidents when they occur. But membership is not a certificate of success — it is a pledge to keep working, year after year.
Sanem Kleff, the network's outgoing director, has spent 25 years building this movement. A teacher and Turkish immigrant herself, she expanded the initiative's focus beyond racism alone to encompass all forms of discrimination: based on nationality, religion, gender, sexual orientation, or physical attributes. "There is no school without racism," Kleff says plainly. "The plaque is not a vaccine against racism." Instead, the goal is to help schools become more capable of naming discrimination, confronting it, and organizing against it. As she puts it, the commitment is clear: "If discrimination, violence, or bullying happen at our school, then we do not look away. We talk about it and solve it."
This philosophy ripples through daily life at participating schools. At a high school in Heidelberg, students walk up a staircase marked "step against racism" — a small but constant reminder of the school's values. That symbolic gesture is reinforced by intensive work throughout the year: an annual "Week Against Racism" each March connects students with Germany's International Weeks Against Racism. During that week, students organize flash mobs and collective art projects, including handprint campaigns that turn hallways into visual statements against discrimination. Teachers weave the topic through their classes, linking literature and social studies to contemporary issues of racism and exclusion.
The network's resilience over three decades speaks to something Kleff learned early on: good political education can make students more resilient against extremist ideologies. The work is not about perfection or cure. It is about building schools where discrimination is named, where intervention is practiced, and where the commitment to human rights for all is written not just above the entrance, but lived in the halls, stairwells, and classrooms every single day.