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It was with great pleasure that I heard that Ken Schoolland had been awarded the first Leonard Read Book Award for education in the principles of liberty and free markets.

I first met Ken at an ISIL conference in Slovakia in the early 90s. I had recently moved to Poland to teach English and was myself caught up in the problem of introducing ideas of liberty to a people hungry for them. In the years since then we have met at various conferences in Eastern Europe and participated in seminars in Lithuania.

In 1997 I lived and worked in Belgrade, Yugoslavia during the time of the demonstrations against the regime. While there I worked with Tomas Krsmanovic, who has worked tirelessly and at some personal risk in having Jonathan Gullible and other works translated and published. We did several press conferences and interviews to promote the Adventure of Jonathan Gullible, with whom I was beginning to feel a warm affinity for in my own peregrinations around the strange world of post-communist Europe.

In 1998 I founded the Liberty English Camp in cooperation with a mutual friend of ours, Virgis Daukas of the Lithuania Free Market Institute and Club Nuomone. The original idea was to hold week-long intensive English courses for Eastern Europeans who were going to participate in libertarian conferences immediately following. In the past, it has been found that Eastern Europeans who have been sponsored for such conferences often arrive rather out of their depth as regards their English skills. Often they spend a week listening to lectures they simply cannot follow because of the advanced level of vocabulary.

In post-communist Europe, as indeed all over the world, one of the most crucial skills necessary for personal success is the ability to speak fluent English. We thought that by establishing high-level English teaching we could give the friends of liberty the tools they need to become influential in their own countries and simultaneously introduce them to the classics of liberty that are among the gems of our language. We also wanted to provide a venue for translators engaged in translating important books to be able to come and consult with native speakers.

The idea was to teach an intensive high-level course to bring participants up to speed for conferences using as reading exercises, texts important to the ideas of liberty, thus enabling them to practice English before the conference and introduce them to the relevant vocabulary. Such courses with a native speaker teacher are extremely expensive when given by commercial language schools and in case you have doubts about introducing ideological material into language classes, I have to tell you that it's already been done, we weren't the first to think of this. I've seen language lessons designed to make American-style feminists or English-style laborites out of students.

I wanted to test an advanced English course, The Language of Liberty, which I had written using readings from Jefferson, Adam Smith, etc, we also brought copies of Bastiat's The Law, Ken Schoolland donated many copies of Jonathan Gullible and a number of friends of liberty donated their time.

Virgis Daukas made all the arrangements for us to meet in a vacation camp near Klaipeda on the shores of the Baltic Sea. We expected a small group of around twenty people and I was looking forward to teaching groups of advanced students of political science, law, economics etc.

Well, life is what happens to you when you are making other plans. We did indeed have many enthusiastic participants but only a few of them spoke English on an advanced enough level to use the materials. We had a few absolute beginners who had to be taught from the beginning and quite a few teenagers.

In my enthusiasm for theory I had completely overlooked the practical fact that couples going for a week to the seashore - surprise! - want to take their families. Ken Schoolland helped save the plan and make the camp a success by creating a teenager's group, which he taught with Jonathan Gullible. (For those of you who don't know Ken, I can tell you that if he sits down in any given place long enough, a child is going to come up to him from somewhere and want to sit on his lap or a teenager is going to come by and want him for a game of basketball.)

The next year I was in Saudi Arabia and couldn't come but the camp was held with the help of John Clark an English teacher in Lithuania. Since then we have gathered a group of teachers and participants who have returned regularly. Beginning students have furthered their English studies and returned to practice their skills and we are beginning to get more of those advanced students who can use the materials we originally had in mind.

Jonathan Gullible proved to be a bit too vocabulary-heavy for formal lessons. Each chapter, though short, introduces too many new and unfamiliar words for intermediate students. However, for the last two camps we have had the assistance of Monika Lukasiewicz, a young Polish lady who is a trained performer and student of voice and drama. Under her direction participants have produced skits from chapters of Jonathan Gullible, that we have all enjoyed immensely. We practice all week for them and each group presents their skit around the campfire at the cookout on our last evening in camp.

Monika fell in love with Jonathan. Upon meeting Ken her reaction, like a lot of people in this part of the world, was "Ken, if you didn't grow up under communism, how is it that you know so much about what it was like?" Monika is very excited by the idea of producing JG in skits and plays. (However at present her attention has been diverted by a small drama called Jerzy Waszyngton Browne in the current production of the Browne Family.)

We have now had four camps. We have gained a lot of experience in how to do it, a lot of it the hard way! At first we had to forego a lot of the teaching of the principles of liberty just to concentrate on English skills. That's OK, the camp is firmly identified with the Free Market Institute and we figure that the people will remember who their friends are. Now we are beginning to attract the attention of serious advanced students who John Clark has introduced to our camp.

We have had participants from Lithuania, Poland and lately Belarus. Virgis is talking about taking the camp to Belarus this year or next and Tomas Krsmanovic has been urging us to bring it to Serbia. We operate on the cheap and self-fund, so our only real problem with expanding and traveling is finding more teachers. We have discussed getting formally organized and seeking outside funding among ourselves, but the fact is that at present, like our hero Jonathan, we are just having so much fun we are reluctant to do anything that might spoil it!

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