Wolf Lotter: Educational gaps – or what about: we learn for life?

Soon it will be autumn again, school will start, the universities and colleges will gradually fill up, and everyone will be holding their heads. You might think that this happens because he plays the most important role in the school, but there is no reason for that. The head and what’s inside has a rather undergrad place in education, and you can literally imagine it that way. The education system is very much a machine, a machine that is always moving, where gears mesh, where nothing happens by chance and the result in the end, following the laws of gravity, just falls in your head Applied, so to speak.

The academic is ready, male, female, diverse.

In the education system as we know it, there is the head at the bottom and a bowl that catches something that is generated at the top. Education, education, education, this is what the good people have been shouting in chorus since the Enlightenment. They do not do this lightly or because they are hostile to parents, teachers and children, at least not in principle. They do it because they hope that the bowl in which the norms and standards of education are combined will come out in the end more than what was put in, for everyone. That’s the idea. As you know, we don’t study for school, or for university, but for life, and that should be good. The more education we get, the better off we are because then we get a more enjoyable job (desk, high duty vs shovel, field service at less than 10 to 38 degrees). So education serves people and their progress. And at the same time, as a side effect so to speak, there are more people with better education who stand up for democracy and the rule of law, for human rights and progress, for science and more equality, because they have heard everything. this is repeated over and over again from kindergarten to high school to seminary groups.

Good intentions rarely come true. The fact that education must always lead to university entrance qualifications and then to university knowledge is a view that has not become politically widespread since the 1970s. That’s because the people who care about education usually only know the education they have. They marched through high schools themselves and then to the university. They believe that it is normal to reserve yourself in offices and authorities or to corporations, which are usually different from offices and authorities because they offer better salaries. All the education that exists is regenerative education, ie off-the-shelf knowledge. You learn what others have already learned, and a little of what the zeitgeist dictates. But in the end, almost every graduate knows the same thing. Differences in talent and abilities are still used in Sunday lectures and on paper. The school is like a factory. You need people who will implement what has fallen into the bowl, the off-the-shelf knowledge.

Of course, you cannot achieve innovations and transformations in that way, because they thrive on the real differences in ideas in the minds of the people involved. Yes: basic education is good. But in society, those with their own conscious minds are ahead. This applies to everyone: craftsmen, cooks, farmers and nurses, not just academics. Knowledge work is skill, mastery. This is not always related to qualifications.

It’s the work we can’t do without robots and AI, everything that isn’t normal work. Those who only learn by heart at some point – lawyers and tax consultants, for example, who only go through their program – are equally unnecessary to managers who only work through their plans. The tool can do that better. For far too long, our education system, including the higher education system, has been designed more and more towards this constant processing of existing practices. That’s why innovations are still the exception for us, not the rule. Unity makes people poor.

Do life skills and knowledge of how to help yourself fit into the curriculum? Not today. And that’s the mistake. No one who knows how to help himself is afraid of anything new. If you stay curious, you don’t need grades. There is a right to education, but not to become smarter without effort. Easy education is a lie to the bowl. This is perhaps the biggest education gap of all.