The first website on the World Wide Web (WWW) recently celebrated its 30th birthday. In these three decades, the Internet has fundamentally changed our lives. Rapid digitization offers many opportunities – especially when we learn to think in a new way and not just digitally map our familiar analogue thought patterns one-to-one. But new thinking encounters strong inertia, especially in the German education sector.
Our educational institutions are stuck in traditional thought and action patterns as well as supposedly relevant educational content. The world of schools and universities is characterized by thinking in terms of specialist skills and disciplines, by hierarchies and priorities, by the accumulation of knowledge and query.
It is a divisive thinking that focuses on the measurable performance of the individual and spends most of the time doing exercises and tests to grade the learners individually.
The Covid-19 pandemic has enlarged the shortcomings of our educational landscape as if under a magnifying glass. As the father of a primary school pupil, I had to experience first hand how children in a country with compulsory schooling were completely neglected by these schools.
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Some of the teaching staff do not even have the simplest digital knowledge, learning materials are not available in digital form – not to mention new thought processes that can hardly be found in education policy.
It is shocking how little the digital knowledge society, in which we live 30 years after the start of the WWW, has arrived in our education systems. In large parts of Europe there is still a discussion about whether the school canon should be supplemented by other subjects in which digital or media skills are taught. In Germany, politicians have initiated a digital pact in which hardware investments are financed, but investments in software and further training are largely left out. Asia is much further ahead in this regard.
Taiwan is much further than Germany
One of the most impressive encounters for me was a conference at which the Taiwanese Digital Minister Audrey Tang 2020 reported on the revision of the curricula for Taiwanese schools and kindergartens. With a view to the necessities of a modern knowledge society, Taipei has decided to replace the term “literacy”, which is used throughout, with “competence”.
So the Taiwanese school system is no longer primarily about teaching basic skills such as writing, reading, arithmetic and collecting and querying as much knowledge as possible. The focus is rather on the development of competencies with strong activation of the very personal skills. The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) and the World Economic Forum (WEF) also list specific key competencies that are of crucial importance in a more complex world.
This includes analytical thinking and active learning, creativity and originality, and technology design and problem solving. Like Taiwan, the two organizations have also understood: The digital future, shaped by rapid change and new technologies, requires a fundamental rethink – a rethink that starts as early as kindergarten if possible. The curricula in German schools, on the other hand, contain little evidence that this change is taking place.
There is still a divisive mindset here, which emphasizes the measurable performance of the individual. The experiences of the “individual measurement” and the resultant grade or score shape the self-perception of the learners. If you have bad grades in mathematics, for example, you will usually avoid science subjects in your later studies and professional life.
The Conference of Education Ministers sets the wrong priorities
For me it was significant what priorities the Conference of Education Ministers (KMK) publicly set during the first lockdown phase in spring 2020: The question was repeatedly whether and how examinations could be held safely – or whether not whole ones Semesters or school years should be skipped because individual exams can no longer be carried out in a way that is safe from deception. It was less about the learning content of the pupils and students and missed material, but about the review and evaluation of the learning successes of the individual, which are considered essential for the further life cycle.
However, if you look at the list of competencies that the OECD and WEF consider to be future-oriented, our education system would have to be oriented towards what learners actually need in our digital century – the KMK should have set completely different priorities. Ultimately, learners can acquire problem-solving skills, self-management, leadership and development skills even without a lecture hall, seminar room or classroom.
Primary school students who are used to teamwork instead of individual work could have organized themselves in small learning groups on social media and video conference platforms; the project tasks would already have been available on digital learning platforms. The learning groups had arranged to meet in a virtual workshop in order to work together on solutions and to look for new tools or to develop them themselves.
If, would, would have – the threefold subjunctive II signaled: In our educational landscape, a fundamental change of perspective is overdue: the learner should finally have moved into the center of interest, not the teacher, the subject matter or the educational institution. Then the learning process would no longer be controlled externally, but would be designed by pupils and students on their own initiative. Then it would become clear that learning is a social process that needs integration as well as a trusting and inspiring environment.
Teamwork instead of individual assessment
Then the end would be that individual evaluation turns every teamwork into a farce and rather reduces the quality of the results than increases it. The School of Design Thinking at the Hasso Plattner Institute in Potsdam, or D-School for short, has been a kind of prototype for the learning world of the 21st century for many years. There are no individual assessments here; instead, the focus is on interdisciplinary cooperation.
While the classic education system continues to rely on the “IQ”, the measurable I-qualities and grading, we focus on the we-qualities – with empirically measurable advantages over traditional educational institutions. Flexibility and variability have shaped learning at the D-School since it was founded in 2007. Now, in a new learning world supported by digital tools, even greater versatility is both necessary and possible.
Networking will not decrease, but increase, and so will complexity. With rigid thought and action patterns, as they still shape our educational landscape, we gamble away our future in the digital age.
The author: Prof. Ulrich Weinberg is director of the School of Design Thinking at the Hasso Plattner Institute in Potsdam.
More: Germany can learn from Taiwan when it comes to a cosmopolitan Internet.