By Marcel Schreiner
Heidelberg. One thing has to be given to Winfried Kretschmann: If the pressure becomes great enough, then the Prime Minister of Baden-Württemberg can say goodbye to a point of view that hardly anyone else apart from himself seems to represent. For the common good, so to speak. That’s exactly what happened in the discussion about eight or nine-year high schools in schools in this country.
But first things first: Kretschmann himself has always been an advocate of the G8, i.e. the shortening of the former school model, in which future high school graduates had to go to school for nine years at the beginning of the millennium. After around two decades, he is quite alone in this opinion. A full 89 percent of users responded to an RNZ Instagram survey with a desire for the return of G9, while only 11 percent see the advantages of the current system.
However, it is also clear that very few people want to go back to the origins. 70 percent of our Instagram users think that the new model needs to change completely, only 19 percent do not believe that fundamental changes are needed. At least there is reason for the majority to breathe a sigh of relief, as Kretschmann himself announced at a press conference on Tuesday: “We will not make any quick decisions or simply return to the G9 of the 1990s.”
Instead, the goal is “to develop a solution that meets the requirements of our time and takes up the recommendations of the citizens’ forum,” Kretschmann continued. If we take a closer look, our social media users also provide initial indications of the problems that need to be overcome in the school system. And these can be divided into three major topic areas about which there is hardly any need for discussion.
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The biggest concern here is certainly the well-being of the students. “Children should be able to relax and be children in addition to school,” hopes one Instagram user, while another agrees: “The students need their time. They only learn under time pressure and are stressed.” A problem that is also described on Facebook.
“My daughter has a 36-hour week, plus the travel time on the bus and train, then homework and then nothing has been learned yet,” says a worried mother, describing the young people’s everyday life and adds: “The only thing left to do is learn, puke on the exam and then forget it. That’s rubbish!”
To put it carefully, our readers believe that it is not just the number of hours that children and young people spend at school every day that needs to be improved, but also the content of how these hours are filled. “Much more important than overturning the G8 would be to purify and reduce the absolutely outdated and cluttered curricula,” the mother continues her point of view: “It would be better to have fewer topics and do them correctly than to have 100,000 things just touched on, without depth and always under time pressure.”
However, the second main topic, the unbalanced and in some parts unrealistic curriculum, also gives rise to criticism from other users. Here, for example, it is demanded that “above all, useful things that one should know should be introduced. How about first aid?” and with “Nutrition, Cooking, Law…” there are also clues as to what one could learn.
What’s surprising is that some users even see more potential here than if they moved away from G9. “Sort through school material, then G8 will work too,” it says on Instagram. On Facebook, a reader answers a user who asks why the current system works elsewhere: “G8 yes, with fewer hours and less (unnecessary) material. The curriculum must urgently needs to be adapted to real life.”
However, one point always comes up that leads to the third problem: the shortage of teachers. The big question, to which hardly anyone has an answer at first: Where should the teachers for an additional grade level come from?
“The country doesn’t necessarily need a new model, but rather ambitious teachers in schools,” can be read in the comment column. The answer “or enough teachers to begin with” didn’t take long to arrive. A problem that could also cause the desire for more digital learning and less bureaucracy to fail.
Solving these issues now falls to the state government as a herculean task. There is actually a lot that speaks against a reform: the majority of the governing party, including the Prime Minister, is actually against moving away from the G8, and it was also decided in the coalition agreement not to debate such a reform. And perhaps the biggest problem with a return to G9 – the question of costs.
2023-12-13 17:47:03
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