Unique Educational Experience in Berlin PDF Print E-mail
By Dragana Borenovic   
Wednesday, 06 October 2004
European College of Liberal Arts (ECLA) in Berlin is the first liberal arts college in Germany, offering a wide range of programs and broad education. The college offers a challenging and unforgettable international learning experience. Imagine the following situation: You are leisurely strolling Berlin streets on a usual Sunday afternoon and you overhear a group of students mentioning words like virtue, ethics versus politics, Machiavelli. It is not a usual scene to encounter on the streets of Berlin, you think. A bit puzzled and curious you decide to follow them and see where are they heading—after all Sunday afternoons are made for wander-abouts.

You enter a café where they are sitting at the table fiercely discussing Plato's allegory of the cave in 'The Republic'.

'This can't possibly be,' you murmur agitatedly to yourself. These people look completely hip- wearing modern clothes, using cell phones and drinking Coca-Cola but yet they sound as if they just came out of classical, Renaissance Academia.

Determined to solve the mystery, you decide to follow them as they exit the café and see what these strange people are about to do next. You see them entering the Pergamon museum—well, it complies with the image so far, but their visit might also be a just a typical touristic 'must-see'. But gosh, nooo....Look at them!!! What are they doing?!? They are meticulously examining the Parthenon frieze for hours already!! They are excitedly scribbling something down and once again saying all these words like 'gigantomachy', Zeus, John Keats.

Now you are already getting nervous and impatient—there is no way you can figure what are these people about on your own. On one hand they fit the place and time, on the other hand there is something strikingly different about them.





Totally furious you approach them and ask where they are from. They smile at you and answer, one after another: Kazakhstan, Portugal, Pakistan, Bulgaria, Hungary, Georgia, South Africa, Germany, USA, Romania, Poland, Siberia, Egypt...What?!? But this makes things only more complicated. So many diverse backgrounds at one place, how is it possible?

You try to stay calm and keep the conversation going. After a while you find out that they are all students at the international college in Berlin - European College of Liberal Arts (ECLA).

They are studying intellectual history, philosophy, political science, literature, film, music, theatre, art history, etc. (this explains it all!). They have great professors from prestigious universities, they read books in original, they talk about them in seminars, they write essays about them and later discuss them with the professors in one-to-one tutorials...They often have art history lectures in Berlin museums and galleries. Right now, for example, they are preparing for their art history essay—discussing how the Parthenon frieze fits Winckelmann ideas of Greek art.

Completely overwhelmed with information and impressions you leave the museum with them and they invite you to their show that is the result of theatre workshop they had this semester. Imagine, what will you do in this situation?

Well, of course you will go and see their performances. You will go and discover that—paradoxically—utopias do exist. And maybe, who knows...maybe you will decide to stay and join them in a Summer University, Academy Year Program or a Second Year Research Program. Maybe you will also want to experience transcendence, excellence, metaphysics, tenants of virtuous life, studying at the Staatsbibliothek, Kurosawa's endless black and white movies, procrastination, having coffee in Prenzlauer Berg, peripatetic discussions, weekly essay frenzy, blissful post-essay feelings, friendships for life...Maybe you will want a shiny gem in your memory. Or maybe, as ECLAites would put it, you would just like to 'dare to excel'.
 
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