Educator Returns to Native Land to Share Her Classroom Expertise : Van Nuys: Leni Jacksen, founder of local private school, spent two months in east German towns showing teachers how to engage youngsters in creative activities.

Leni Jacksen was bright, energetic and eager to help educate her country’s youth.

She was also Jewish, which, in the Germany of the late 1930s, meant she could die or flee. She fled.

She came to America and spent the next half-century building a family and a teaching career. But, at 75, Jacksen, who founded the private Children’s Community School in Van Nuys, still longed to help her native land. This fall, she got her chance.

Jacksen was asked by the Free University of Berlin to show teachers in former Communist territory how to introduce a democratic curriculum into the country’s Kitas --child care centers for youngsters under 12.

She spent two months in towns that used to comprise East Germany. She found that the Berlin Wall may have come down in 1989, but the barricades to a new, more enlightened post-Cold War Germany aren’t quite ready to tumble.

“It will take 10 or 20 years before things change,” said Jacksen, who returned last month to her home in Beverly Hills. “Teachers don’t really know what to do.”

Jacksen was shocked to find teachers merely supervised youngsters, never engaging them in creative activities.

“There was no painting, no playing with blocks, and no animals,” she said. “All they’re doing is making sure the kids don’t get hurt or kill each other.”

She believes she did get through to a few instructors.

“If I got five, that’s a lot,” she said. “But those five will get another five, and so on.”

The biggest reason for the lack of creativity, Jacksen said, is that the former East German territory has no recent experience with democracy, whose educational emphasis is on thinking and interaction rather than obedience.

“There are two generations brought up by Communism, and, before that, it was fascism,” she said. “The idea was to educate the child for the state.”

In 1971, Jacksen served as a school principal in Berlin, “but that was just another job. It could have been Paris or Milan.”

This time, she had an opportunity to make a difference, and whatever may develop in Germany’s future, Jacksen knows she did her best. She says she has no interest in hanging on to hatred for the nation that put Adolf Hitler in power. She also says she experienced no anti-Semitism during her visit.

“For me, all that was over with,” said Jacksen. “I only saw that you had people who needed help in a field I am familiar with. There is something in me that hasn’t forgotten Germany.”