Boarding Life

At Landesschule Pforte all students live in the boarding school, there are no external students. The boarding houses do not offer merely accomodation for those students who live too far away to go home every day. Thus, our boarding school becomes the self-evident place of living for all "alumni Portenses", and seen from this internal point of view it soon loses any extraordinary status that might provoke extraordinary (mis)behaviour. The self-evidence of this new place of living is emphasized by the integration of all teachers: There is no extra boarding staff, but the regular teachers, in addition to their lessons, are on duty in the boarding houses.

The purpose of this is to avoid the separation of lessons and boarding life and to promote intellectual and social learning as a comprehensive process. Here nobody is stigmatized as a swot or outsider when being good at school. But the former "individual fighter" too has to learn to integrate, to go up to other students open-minded and to live together with them in the boarding school. The result is a dense atmosphere of learning that offers each student multiple support by other students or teachers on duty and that pushes him, even when he himself is less motivated. On the other hand the intense social contact opens amazing potentials of creativity leading to the enormous leisure activities of our students. Since you can do much more in a large group with lots of contacts than alone.

Originally having been a medieval monastery, the ensemble of buildings has its own old and time-honoured charm, but thus too claims to living comfort have to be confined to the scale of renovated old buildings. There are six houses. Two of them are situated around the old cloister, the other ones are outer buildings mostly built about 1900 and by now entirely renovated. Girls and boys do not have to live in separate houses, but at least on separate floors. On the other hand it is part of the educational concept that students of all ages (14-18 years) live together on one floor, but in separate rooms. Most of the rooms have two beds, but there are also some rooms with one, three or even four beds. The latter in general are left to the newcomers of the lower classes, after the graduates have left school and all other students have moved room.

Each of the six houses with 53-83 students is led by a teacher as a housemaster or a hausemistress who lives in the house and takes care of the students especially in the night. Furthermore, every house has a team of six teachers who by daily turns are on duty from 4.30 to 11.00 p.m. The teachers on duty are assisted by students. For there are lots of little duties they have to do by turns to get them used to taking over social responsibility.

Leisure activities are also left to the students. Indeed teachers, too, offer some workshops and organize excursions to theatre performances at Weimar, Leipzig or Halle, but most of all activities are organized by the students themselves. There are lots of activities with different subjects: languages, natural sciences, sports, a students' cafe, amnesty international, a school magazine and many more. If needed, school rooms and the gymnasium are available. For pure relaxing there are the park, the adjacent forest and the nearby towns of Bad Kösen and Naumburg, in bad weather the students' library and the club rooms with tv equipment.