The problem was prosaic before it became philosophical. The Coal and Steel Community's High Authority, headquartered in Luxembourg, needed to recruit officials from six countries, and those officials needed somewhere to send their children to school. A French family would not relocate to a Luxembourgish primary school. A Dutch family would not enroll their children in a German Gymnasium. Without a solution, the new European institution could not staff itself with the diverse civil servants its legitimacy required. So the staff did what staff often do when bureaucracy fails them: they organized. In 1953, employees of the ECSC formed an association, secured funding from the High Authority, hired teachers, and opened a school. A year later, by the autumn of 1954, they realized they had built only half a solution. The children were growing up, and there was no secondary school to send them to.

Jean Monnet, the French cognac merchant turned architect of European integration, was president of the High Authority. He understood that the school had become something more than a staffing problem. He invited the education ministers of all six founding states to Luxembourg to discuss something unprecedented: a school with intergovernmental status, with teachers seconded from member countries, with a curriculum requiring every student to learn history and geography in a foreign language and from a foreign point of view. The ministers transformed themselves into a Board of Governors. On 12 October 1954, the first two years of the secondary school opened. On 12 April 1957, the six governments signed the Statute of the European School as a binding international treaty. The school was now an institution of European law.

On 11 December 1957, a new custom-built schoolhouse opened on Boulevard de la Foire in Luxembourg. René Mayer, who had succeeded Monnet at the head of the ECSC, spoke at the ceremony. "May the Europe of the European schools definitively take the place of the Europe of the war cemeteries." The words were not rhetorical flourish. In Latin, the same sentiment was inscribed on parchment and sealed into the foundation stone of every European School built thereafter. The architects of the institution were aware that they were attempting something that history had repeatedly suggested was impossible. They were teaching German children and French children, Italian children and Belgian children, in the same classrooms, in each other's languages, twelve years after the camps had been liberated.

Once the model existed, it multiplied. Brussels got its first European School in 1958, followed by Mol in Belgium that same year. Then Varese, Italy in 1960, Karlsruhe in 1962, Bergen in the Netherlands in 1963, a second Brussels school in 1974, and Munich in 1977 to serve the children of staff at the European Patent Organisation. Today, thirteen European Schools operate across six EU member states, with fourteen more accredited schools using the same curriculum and awarding the European Baccalaureate. The Baccalaureate is recognized by every EU member state's universities as equivalent to a national leaving qualification. A student educated entirely in this system might have taken history in German, mathematics in French, sciences in English, and graduated as a kind of cultural native of nowhere in particular and everywhere at once.

At midnight Central European Time on 31 August 2021, something happened that the architects of 1957 never imagined: a country left. The United Kingdom, which had joined the European Schools system in 1973 when it acceded to the European Communities, formally withdrew under the terms of the Brexit Withdrawal Agreement. The Europa School near Oxford lost its accreditation. Its students could no longer sit the European Baccalaureate. The treaty signed in Luxembourg almost sixty-four years earlier, intended to prevent the unraveling of Europe, had survived one country choosing to unravel itself. The other twenty-six member states, the EU institutions, and Euratom remain contracting parties. The schools continue to teach. Each foundation stone still carries its Latin promise about war cemeteries, sealed in 1957 and unchanged.