Letter to the editor

Hypocrisy

Today’s migratory situation within the EU territory has been produced by exactly those circles who are now posing as “saviours”.
First, there is NATO, an offensive alliance, that created precisely that chaos in Afghanistan, in Iraq, in Lybia and in Syria, which triggered off the present flood of migrants.
Many EU states are therefore themselves responsible for the current predicament.
The large-scale industry is looking forward to the cheap workforce gained that way. It is going to undercut the earnings of today’s labour proletariat by price-dumping and black market labour, that way further weakening the middle classes, a process which will cause substantial social conflicts.
The rising attractiveness of the EU region has been increased by the media and by the oh-so-solidary left-wing parties to such an extent that more and more asylum-seekers will risk the perilous journey across the sea and will be drowned miserably.
What good do all the tears do? What is the point of putting yourself into the limelight as a “do-gooder” while sweeping all the facts under the carpet?
With self-righteousness and sentimentality you cannot practice responsible governance.
What is needed is a relentless course of action against traffickers, the creation of EU reception camps in the neigbouring areas of crisis regions, and the ending of the NATO’s and the Anglo-Saxons’ post-colonial behaviour in Africa and the Near East.

National Councillor Oskar Freysinger, Savièse

(Translation Current Concerns)

Schools are suffering from chronic reforms

Over the years our rather efficient school system has had to deal with ever new reforms. These reforms are based on various ideologies. In the planned Curriculum 21, the magic word is “competence orientation”. New forms of learning and a new learning culture are to be promoted and find their way into the system. Part of them are the so-called “self-directed” and “individualized” learning, where each pupil receives his or her own lesson plan and should mainly work on his own. Classroom teaching and teaching from the front of the classroom should be eliminated and the teacher should withdraw from the actual learning process and mainly accompany the learning process and act as a coach who creates learning environments. It is clear, that for the new Curriculum 21 – somewhat influenced by the “gender ideology” – with its “competence avelange” it will be difficult to overrun the Swiss schools harmoniously. It seems that our schools must go on to suffer from a chronic reform fever which is also directed globally.

Karl Frey, Olten

(Translation Current Concerns)

Math learning is different!

It is something new at school that children are taught how to cheat. Our son brought worksheets home from school by Vivian Mohr entitled “kriminell gut rechnen” (calculating criminally-well). “Calculating criminallywell” is a teaching tool to train mathematical competences. The task was to read the story of a cool youth gang, which are up to quite some nonsense. Among others, they cheat their classmates, which another gang of children finds out by their own research. Following the story, the given math problem was: “How could the cool youth gang have cheated without that the crime would have realized it immediately?!”
The worksheets have no longer anything to do with mathematics. None of the tasks contained therein could be solved mathematically. With computing competences, our children should learn how to cheat! Competence-oriented teaching, as provided by Curriculum 21, does not contain any value-orientation. Since competencies are only functional, they are ethically neutral. In this context the education expert Prof Dr Jochen Krautz­ writes: “Competence-orientation neglects contents. The contents become secondary. They have no value in themselves, but serve only as a means to achieve the goal. By which content one attains a skill does basically not matter: For the training of ‘literacy’, it is immaterial whether a poem by Goethe, or a user manual for a smart phone is employed. Functional for ‘literacy’ are both. However, educational lessons assume, that one learns to read in order to be able to understand the literary contents.” Do we really want lessons in our schools, in which the contents no longer matter? Contents are therefore significant in order to help our children become critically and independently thinking people. For that they need a comprehensive education.

Gabriella Hunziker, Mühlrüti

(Translation Current Concerns)