Elite Traveler Spring 2022

INFLUENCE THE BIG INTERVIEW

BernhardGademann on inspiring future generations

Institut auf demRosenberg’s director and headmaster, Bernhard Gademann, sits down with Sophie Killip to discuss robots, our changing world, and keeping his school in the 2 1 st century Institut auf dem Rosenberg is arguably one of the best schools in the world. A state-of-the-art private boarding school in Switzerland, it o ff ers students individualized education that prepares them not just for graduation, but for what the outside world will look like in the future. Founded in 1889, Rosenberg has been steered throughout its lifetime by the Gademann family — fourth-generation Bernhard Gademann is currently at the helm as headmaster and director. Previously a student at Rosenberg himself, Gademann went to university in the UK before moving to New York, where he worked in fi nance and technolo g y. His father (who was headmaster before him) sadly passed away in 2009. It was at this point that Gademann and his wife Anita (now the school’s head of innovation) needed to decide if running Rosenberg — with its 230 students, ranging from K1 to Grade 12 — was a challenge that they wanted to take on. “It was very quickly clear to us that we wanted to do it,” Gademann says, talking to Elite Traveler from his home on campus. “However, it was important to us that we take the school into the 21st century, which I believe we have achieved.” As a family business that has been educating future world leaders for over 130 years, Gademann is acutely aware that Rosenberg is steeped in tradition. “It’s great

students home, which was in late February,” Gademann says. “We were seeing fl ights shut down and border closures… We announced the news at midday. Four hours later, 50% of the students had departed — it showed that the parents were ready and happy to bring their children home.” “Three days later, we moved online,” he continues. “We developed new timetables for the students. The day before we went live, we realized we had a bandwidth problem — as we normally do everything via Wi-Fi — and spent until 3am hardwiring every single computer in the school. We had a help desk ready for any issues. We taught online for two-and-a-half months.” After this, Gademann and his team agreed that they would invite all the students back for the summer term and to stay over the summer to make up the time missed earlier in the year. “The vast majority of the students came back,” he says, “so they actually ended up receiving more face-to-face education in 2020 than they would in a normal year.” Compared to many traditional schools around the world that shut their doors for months in 2020, Rosenberg’s fl exibility and dedication to its students’ education during the pandemic is commendable. Gademann admits that it is “much harder to keep going than to call it quits,” but argues that for him, it’s about “leading by example. It was very important for us to say to our students: Here’s a challenge. Here is adversity. What are we going to do about it?”

to have roots, to know where you’ve come from and cherish that tradition,” he says, “but we understand that there is a thin line between traditional and dusty. We take a very forward-thinking approach, and we would never follow traditions for the sake of it.” This forward-thinking nature can be seen in the team that works at Rosenberg; teachers are known as the ‘artisans of education,’ and the attitude towards innovation and experimentation more closely resembles a start-up than a traditional school. This quick thinking and the ability to adapt was also paramount in Rosenberg’s reaction to the start of the Covid-19 pandemic in early 2020. “We were the fi rst school in Switzerland to send

“Young adults nowadays want to bemuch more authentic. There is a desire to

make a real di ff erence”