And in such an education? Berlin schools went on strike on Tuesday to support unions’ demands for smaller classes. And on Monday, a comparative study of academic achievement across all 16 federal states made it clear that today’s fourth-graders are worse off than ever in German and math.
The fact that the IQB Institute study at the Humboldt University of Berlin is called the “Educational Trend” may be found almost odd, because it basically measures changes in the rate and extent of drop in levels, like numerous academic achievement studies for years.
A new trend would therefore be more than desirable. Instead, Germany continues to teeter in an academic impasse that has been solidly cemented with state responsibilities. From study to study, it is debated and discussed again and again, as if it were of paramount importance in the top view what the crown quarantines or the number of refugees have changed in the performance profile.
These factors only added nuances or even outliers to the overall trend: the “Bildungstrend” report recorded short-term improvements in some federal states in 2016. The fact that an increasing number of precarious education workers are growing in German schools has more to do with the excess of reform, the shortage of teachers and an increasingly heterogeneous group of students than with single events.
But politicians are apparently unable to draw the right conclusions and do not see the fundamental risks that this entails.
So far, failed school careers and sliding into social marginalization have mostly been dealt with from the perspective of those affected, as has the fact that children from poorly educated families usually become poorly educated adults who re-raise. children with poor and early education.
According to statistics, uneducated women have more children than those with higher qualifications. It is therefore foreseeable that there is a risk of disproportion. At the same time, the state spends more money on social benefits every year. How much more profitable would it be to invest the billions in educational opportunities at the beginning rather than later to make up for failure?
But that is not all. Critical skills in areas like reading, writing, and arithmetic are a slow mortgage for the entire state. Keeping complex systems like democracies alive requires people who know what’s going on. Those who can and want to read or calculate something and understand it.
Competent citizens not only appear out of the blue, they need to be trained
Which are not arbitrarily manipulable or completely indifferent. In the ideas of Jürgen Habermas: rational publics. They do not fall from the sky. They need to be trained. This is not optional. This is the basis.
However, Germany is not like that when it comes to keeping the foundations. Everywhere freestyle is put first of duty. Take, for example, the unreasonable demands for car tolls, which could unnecessarily gobble up hundreds of millions of euros as bridges and roads are rotting across the country. And that’s how it ultimately works in education policy. Questions in the canteen are on the agenda, while in the classrooms the plaster falls from the ceiling and the multiplication tables are neglected.
The demands that modern societies place on their populations – dealing with fake news is only a fraction of them – are becoming more and more demanding. Allowing children to learn to read, write and do arithmetic during such global developments is, at worst, selling out the entire state model.
Politicians have recently drawn attention with Wumms’ actions. A boom against the Crown crisis, a double boom against the energy crisis. A triple boom against the education crisis would also be needed. If no longer needed.
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