The school - our enemy?
It's not easy for me to write today's article because it will offend a lot of people around me and will probably earn me some nasty comments. But the topic is on my mind too often to leave the following unsaid. It's about the increasingly aggressive criticism of schools.
In this day and age, when click rates and interactions in social media are important and everything that comes across as crisp and striking is shared on Facebook and the like, journalists, authors and experts are increasingly resorting to the strategy of «polarising and emotionalising». Titles such as «School infarction» or «The teacher hater book» are used to attract attention. Experts who are interviewed on the subject of schools and invited to talk shows are increasingly mixing justified criticism with populist rhetoric.
Does learning make you stupid?
A few months before the publication of his book «Anna, die Schule und der liebe Gott. The betrayal of our education system by our children», the philosopher Richard David Precht invited the German professor Gerald Hüther onto his programme - under the title: «Skandal Schule. Does learning make you stupid?»
Precht introduced the programme with the following generalisation: «In our schools, children are being taught the wrong things by the wrong people using the wrong methods. "That was six years ago. Since then, the tone has become even harsher. Gerald Hüther claims that our schools are training our children to become "system beings» who cannot think for themselves, turning them into uncreative caretakers.
At birth, 98% of all people are highly gifted; after school, the figure is only 2 per cent.
Quote from the film "Alphabet"
The film «Alphabet», which has been much discussed over the last three years, not only shows interesting learning and educational alternatives. It also advertises on the film poster and DVD cover with the quote: «At birth, 98% of all people are highly gifted, but by the time they leave school, only 2% are still gifted.»
Since then, I have come across this statement again and again on Facebook, in articles and in books. Comments like these have parents up in arms. How can we entrust our children, who mean so much to us, to such seemingly cruel institutions?
Who benefits from fuelling anger and fear?
But where do the figures that are used to criticise our current school system come from? In this case, they can be traced back to a study conducted 50 years ago by George Land in the USA. The study did not measure children's talent in general, but a very specific form of creativity: the ability to think divergently. The study shows that children are much better at this than adults.
It serves no one if we declare the school to be the enemy and unnecessarily fuel anger and fear.
However, we should by no means conclude from this that children forget this at school. By analogy, we could show that children aged four pick up a new language much faster than twelve-year-olds or adults. However, it would be anything but correct to conclude from this that our language skills are trained away from us by school.
It is right and important to scrutinise our education system time and again, to name shortcomings and problems and to push for solutions. We are allowed to be critical, but we should also maintain our critical faculties towards our critics and take a closer look. It serves no one if we declare schools to be the enemy and unnecessarily fuel anger and fear.
Many school critics want a rebellion and operate according to the motto «the end justifies the means». However, we do not live in a dictatorship, but in a democracy. Here in Switzerland in particular, we solve problems through dialogue.
We are losing the good teachers
What do we need for good schools? Relationship! This is exactly what Hüther and Precht emphasise, and I find their basic messages valuable and true. We all want a school where pupils feel comfortable, enjoy learning and can discover their strengths and potential.
To do this, we need teachers who enjoy teaching and can engage with the pupils. And this is where the problem lies in the vehemence with which Hüther and Precht attack schools. Because the more negative the mood becomes, the more the school is declared the scapegoat for all social problems, the fewer young adults will enter this profession for the right reasons.
Most parents still have confidence in their teachers.
And the less appreciation teachers receive for their increasingly demanding work, the less they can pass this on to our children and the more likely it is that the most committed among them will throw in the towel after a few years.
In Switzerland, most parents and teachers are still ready and willing to engage with each other. We can still be pleased that most encounters between parents and teachers are constructive and that discussions are conducted with the necessary respect and mutual appreciation. Most parents still have confidence in their children's teachers. We must ensure that this remains the case.
Hüther and Precht actually have a very nice message: they say that encouragement and relationships are the key to learning and not devaluation. They emphasise that cooperation and constructive dialogue, rather than competitiveness and hostility, is what helps us to progress as human beings.
I would like us to have this attitude towards everyone in the school system - parents, children and teachers. And we would do well to take a critical look at areas where the media, experts and we ourselves lack this attitude.
