Every society reproduces itself not only through its economy and its politics, but through its schools. In Liechtenstein, this fact is no less true. What we call “education” is in reality a system of training, one that prepares the young not to govern themselves but to fit into the structures of dependency that define our state. Our schools teach obedience, competition, and preparation for managerial roles in industries that serve foreign capital. They do not teach cooperation, solidarity, or the practice of democracy. In this sense, the classroom is not neutral — it is one of the primary instruments by which dependence is reproduced.
Consider what it means to be educated in Liechtenstein today. From the earliest years, children are taught languages and skills that will allow them to manage wealth that is not their own. Technical training is directed toward the service of finance, administration, and specialized industries that anchor us to international markets rather than to our own needs. Humanities are stripped of their radical potential, transformed into exercises in heritage and patriotism rather than tools of critical thought. Education here does not prepare us to be free; it prepares us to be useful to those who hold power — whether that power resides in Vaduz, Zurich, or farther abroad.
If sovereignty is ever to be real in Liechtenstein, education must be the first ground of transformation. To build a communal economy, we need citizens trained not as competitors but as cooperators. To build communal freedom, we need people educated not in obedience but in self-governance. Education must therefore be reimagined as the process by which a society prepares its young to take responsibility for their collective life, to think critically about their structures, and to act together to transform them. In other words, education must become liberation.
The radical tradition offers us guidance here. Paulo Freire, in his Pedagogy of the Oppressed, argued that conventional schooling operates like a “banking system”: students are treated as empty accounts into which official knowledge is deposited, their role to receive and repeat rather than question and create. Against this, Freire proposed a pedagogy of dialogue, where students and teachers learn together as equals, generating critical awareness of their world and preparing to act upon it. In a small country like ours, such an approach is not only possible but uniquely suited to our scale. With fewer than 40,000 people, every school could be a workshop in democracy, every classroom a council where children learn by practicing the very forms of collective decision-making we wish to see in society.
Critics will insist that Liechtenstein cannot afford such experiments, that the realities of the global economy demand that our youth be competitive, efficient, and disciplined if they are to “succeed.” But succeed at what? At perpetuating a financial system that serves outsiders? At integrating ever more tightly into a Swiss-German labor market that leaves us dependent? At becoming guardians of wealth we do not own? To reproduce the present form of education is simply to reproduce dependency. To transform it is to open the possibility of independence.
What, then, would a liberated education look like in practice? First, it would mean that schools are controlled not by ministries and monarchs but by communities themselves: parents, students, and teachers making decisions together in assemblies. Second, it would mean shifting the content of education away from obedience and toward stewardship — of the land, of shared resources, of democratic institutions. Children would learn not simply arithmetic and grammar, but how to organize a cooperative, how to deliberate in an assembly, how to defend their commons against exploitation. Third, it would mean tearing down the wall between school and society. Education would not be confined to the classroom but embedded in the life of the community: on the farm, in the workshop, at the council hall. In short, education would be a form of living democracy.
Such a transformation is not utopian; it has precedents. The workers’ schools of revolutionary Spain, the literacy campaigns of revolutionary Cuba, the community schools built by Indigenous movements in Latin America — all of these are examples where oppressed peoples created systems of education that broke with obedience and prepared new generations for freedom. None were perfect, and all faced the hostility of entrenched power. But they demonstrate that education can be more than reproduction; it can be creation, the making of new forms of life.
To speak of education is therefore to speak of the future of Liechtenstein itself. If we continue to train our youth for dependency, then dependency is all we will ever know. But if we train our youth for freedom — for cooperation, solidarity, and self-rule — then even a country as small as ours can model a new form of sovereignty. Education is not a secondary question; it is the question. For it is in the classroom, more than in treaties or tax codes, that the future of Liechtenstein is decided.