"I was once amazed to discover that the word school, which has the same root in most European languages, comes from the Greek skhole meaning 'time of leisure'. In Ancient Greece that denoted the period that followed physical exercises and was devoted to the study of the arts.
It is hard to speak of any uniform style of schooling at the current time. Only one thing can be said for certain: there aren't any schools that are places of leisure, and only rarely does one come across a school where children are given basic instruction in how to live, how to distinguish between values and pseudo-values, between the essential and the superfluous, where they can learn to understand themselves and other people and are given a grounding in the culture and civilization into which they were born."
Ivan Klíma was born in 1931 in Prague. He spent over 3 years in a Nazi concentration camp as a child. From 1970 he was blacklisted by the Communist regimes in Czechoslovakia, and could only publish abroad. He was deeply involved in the Velvet Revolution of 1989 with other dissident writers such as Václav Havel. His books and plays have been translated into 30 languages.
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