Talks in Switzerland | "The school system makes you ill"

By WSF - Ricardo Leppe 12 May 2022

Talks in Switzerland | "The school system makes you ill"

Talk in Switzerland, part 1 (German)

Until recently I had no idea how many online congresses there are… at the moment I am allowed to speak at a great many of them :)

Talk in Switzerland, part 2 (German)

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The hurdles for a teacher to leave the civil service are high.

(Munich) Fear of unemployment, loss of pension entitlements, possibly even a complete change of profession loom. Nevertheless, teachers keep throwing in the towel and leaving. A Bavarian primary school teacher has now done so. News4teachers has the reasons she gave in her application for release from civil servant status. We publish an abridged, anonymised extract of the application here, with the source.

Pursuant to Section 33 BBG BeamtStG and Section 24 (1) No. 4 BeamtStG, I hereby apply for release from civil servant status.

I am aware that I will thereby lose my entitlement to employment as well as my pension entitlements. I know that there is currently a shortage of teachers, and yet I am not prepared to make my labour, my expertise and my passion for the teaching profession available, because nothing is changing structurally.

I thank the Free State of Bavaria for my training in theory and practice and for the opportunity to have worked as a primary school teacher. I am a teacher heart and soul and have greatly enjoyed my time with the children in the classroom! At the same time, I have had to experience how much this system harms everyone involved in it: parents, teachers, pupils and head teachers.

The most important reasons that led to my decision no longer to work in this system are the following:

1) The human being as an object

I find it unacceptable not to be allowed to meet children, a vulnerable group, on a human level, but to have to turn them into objects of expectations who are seen only in their role and function. Regarding children as a file of an administrative apparatus contradicts my humanistic outlook. (…)

Incidentally, the people affected here are not only the children, but also parents and, as the extended arm of the state, teachers and head teachers.

We are all affected by the fact that the state administrative apparatus does not trust us to act responsibly and independently.

At school, children have to function, regardless of whether they have just fled their home country or are being beaten or sexually abused at home. There is no time, no space, no training, no encouragement, no guidance, no staff, no supervision, no multi-professional team – simply no possibility at all, as a teacher, to do justice to these children, to be a first point of contact and to make the “school as a safe space” more than an empty phrase.

Today’s school system still relies on obedience and peer pressure, which leads to submissiveness to authority and a lack of willingness to take responsibility. Because of the suppression of their own needs enforced by the structure of school, some quickly project their anger and hatred onto other people. Bullying is the order of the day in German schools.

2) Violation of human rights, the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities and the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child

At school, children are discriminated against not only because they are under 18, but also because of their origin, their ethnicity, the colour of their skin, their gender, their parents’ level of education, their first name and their parents’ poverty. (…)

In addition, schools in Germany hardly implement inclusion and thereby disadvantage people with disabilities, which also violates the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities adopted in 2008.

A further aspect that leads to the conclusion that children’s rights to protection are disregarded at school concerns the respectful treatment of pupils by teachers. The “mental sadism” towards pupils that Kurt Singer speaks of (Singer 1998, p. 29) is part of everyday life in schools. Pupils are humiliated, exposed and made a laughing stock by teachers in front of the class. Article 16 of the Convention states: “No child shall be subjected to arbitrary or unlawful interference with his or her privacy, family, home or correspondence, nor to unlawful attacks on his or her honour and reputation.” Yet circumstances hostile to children are part of everyday school life and act as psychological pressure and degrading behaviour (cf. Singer 1998), which must be defined as a violation of human rights. (…)

The curriculum to which head teachers and teachers are bound says: democracy lived out. Democracy not as a subject, a lesson, a label, but as an attitude lived out in school. In practice we are miles away from that. State schools are traditionally a place of experiencing domination and hierarchical communication, not participation.

3) The concept of learning

The way learning is conceived at school still assumes that knowledge can be transferred from one person to another – whether the other wants it or not. Studies have shown that the joy of learning in state schools decreases continuously.

Why do so many children lose the joy of learning after only a very short time at school? How do people actually learn? Contrary to popular belief, the brain is not a muscle that can be trained.

The brain is primarily a filtering organ, not a storage organ. It filters out what is not meaningful to the person concerned. If learning processes are to be effective, the learner must therefore link them with positive emotions, i.e. experience them as meaningful and enjoyable.

Since all intrinsic motivation is inevitably suppressed by every attempt at extrinsic motivation, a person’s desire to learn can only be awakened if they are given the opportunity to experience themselves as the shaper of their own learning processes. But that can only succeed if children are no longer treated as objects of expectations, assessments and instruction.

It is not only children who find it gruelling to have uninteresting material drummed into them. It also wears me down as a teacher to fight against the lack of interest. A class sitting apathetically in front of me strains my nerves. I use a lot of energy disciplining the pupils, energy that is then lost elsewhere. The exhausting fight against disinterest is not without consequences: I feel tired and exhausted. Both sides are harmed: teachers, because they are supposed to use power to motivate pupils for something that lies outside their horizon of interest; pupils, because they are forced into learning processes that do not suit them. The young people become weary of learning, and I as a teacher become weary of teaching.

The exorbitant need for private tutoring shows that school is not able to teach all children the necessary content. But isn’t that actually the original task of school? Here, too, the school system is unable to meet its own standards.

For decades, numerous scientific findings from developmental psychology, education, the social sciences, and educational and brain research have been available that tell us how learning works sustainably and what children and young people need in order to develop well and learn effectively. If little of this is put into practice, we do not have a knowledge deficit but an implementation problem.

But even when these conditions are met – when new knowledge and skills can be recognised and experienced as meaningful, connectable, holistic, emotionally tangible and of practical use – the question of the quality, didactics and methodology of teaching only becomes interesting once the children are also open to these educational offers.

The aim of this education is not the most perfect possible acquisition of the knowledge currently available, but awakening the enthusiasm that drives the next generation to produce new knowledge and new cultural achievements themselves. I would be only too happy to help achieve such goals!

Source: news4teachers (German)