Restoring a sense of community to our schools

It is a lucky coincidence when from difficult situations, people draw positive, inspiring impulses leading to something new. Jochen Krautz has done so successfully and excellently with his new book “Bilder von Bildung” (Images of Education). In its foreword, he writes that, among the soaked books he was able to rescue from his study after the 2021 floods in the Ahr Valley had drained away, was one by Otto Friedrich Bollnow entitled “Krise, Kritik und Neuanfang – Crisis, Critique and New Beginnings”. This is an outline of the task we are also facing in education today.

A found object and its consequences

For the author, these “findings” became the occasion to stimulate a long overdue debate. We are challenged to put an end to the unfortunate development in education that has been going on for years, and to give our schools back their true meaning. As the subtitle of the book says, it is about the renaissance of schooling. Under discussion are the many past reform steps that need to be honestly thought through. They have made our schooling entirely different in the past decades. Jochen Krautz, Professor of Art at the University of Wuppertal, knows what he is talking about, and he does it in a way that makes reading a pleasure. On the left, we always find a thematically and artistically carefully selected work by a well-known artist – all from different eras, works by their students or photographs by the author – it is quite feasible to linger over each of them. Corresponding short, content-rich texts on 67 themes can be read on the right. They reflect the key points of the current discussion on education and point to what would constitute the sense of community in schooling and education. All this is presented in a language that makes the book easy to read, as does the coherent interrelatedness of the topics. Personally, reading the book stimulated me to give my own thoughts to the topics, which is something I wish to other readers as well. In order to make the content of this book tangible and visible, the author himself will therefore often have his say in the following comments on the content of his book and will also inspire you as readers to think and do.

“We are social beings …”

Starting with the anthropological and developmental psychological foundations, the author points to the essentials of school as a place of learning. They prove the social nature of human beings, which must be the starting point of all teaching: “We are social beings and at the same time we only become so in human relationships”. After years or decades of contrary school reforms, a renaissance is urgently needed. Only then will school once again become a place where children and young people – accompanied and guided by mature relationship persons – can learn according to their social nature and acquire education in an individual development process. Here, too, a renewed focus on the essentials is necessary, because instruction or guidance have acquired a negative reputation today, says Krautz: “People suspect brash authoritarian bearing and would rather see the child develop on its own.” (p. 15) With this view, however, the adult denies his or her responsibility in the process of a child’s personality development: “The ability for responsible self-development does not come about by leaving children to their own devices. The child’s inner creative power that makes it ‘grow’ needs guidance and frameworks for the child to become a social being.” (p. 15)

“… requires careful and committed pedagogical work”

These insights are crucial to any learning process, a holistic process in which a child individually develops his or her intellectual, emotional and social skills. Here Krautz also takes a critical look at the teaching concepts that have become fashionable and are one-sidedly focused on neuroscience: “Mind, however, is not only located in the brain, which is why brain researchers never find it there in their colourful pictures. That is why there is no such thing as ‘brain-friendly’ teaching. No, the whole human being with body and soul is mind, is spiritual.” (p. 21) That is why real education needs a pedagogical relationship that educates professionally and educates through the subject matter. Relationship and learning are interconnected and find ideal conditions for success in classroom teaching (today often wrongly disparaged as ‘frontal teaching’, in deliberate association with military drill).
  It is about the core of pedagogical work, and the class becomes “a community that works together on the matter at hand and in which the separate persons grow together in the process. However, this does not happen by itself, but requires careful and committed pedagogical work”. (p. 37) Such a teaching process “does not end with the application of methods. It demands and educates the teachers in their wholeness. Otherwise, it will remain a business conducted with a distanced attitude, in which both sides lose”. (p. 35) In an inner connection with the children and young people, the teacher then creates a lesson in which “questions of fact are clarified as questions of fact, judgements are linked to arguments, consideration is shown for and a share is taken in others, others are understood, conflicts are solved constructively and without violence, cooperation and mutual help are practised, etc.” (p. 33).

“This is the key factor of a successfully practised pedagogy”

These premises of teaching based on new scientific findings relegate the currently propagated self-discovering and self-organised learning SOL (also called “school without teachers”) to the rank of mere outdated teaching methods, because they neglect anthropological, psychological and didactic findings, or as the author puts it:
  “So, it is not ‘modern’ to teach against human nature, which has produced our culture over hundreds of thousands of years. It is simply foolish. And as a result, man does not become more independent and wiser, but unfree and stupid.” (p. 45)
  And it is always a matter of enabling the children and young people to accept and master their life’s tasks with confidence and courage, tasks that every child faces and which can strengthen their sense of self-efficacy: “Tasks can teach us not to evade the demands of life, but to face them courageously, to start, to persevere, even if it is not always clear whether we will succeed and what the result will be”. (p. 59) Such teaching places high demands on the teacher, both humanly and professionally: “This is the key factor of a successfully practised pedagogy: professional challenges, clear announcements, tailor-made help, unshakeable confidence and a big heart for the young people in their life and work. A basic principle as simple as it is forgotten.” (p. 47)

“Learning by showing therefore sets us free”

This also includes the necessary practice phases, here lies “the path to real independence, the path to freedom!” (p. 49) And to become free, independent in thought and responsible in action, requires careful guidance, a teaching principle that also needs a renaissance, because “if someone shows me something, I can replicate this inwardly and imitate it outwardly. In doing so, I learn how that something works”. (p. 45) This learning process is as simple as it is logical and helps the child to appropriate the world: “Learning by showing therefore sets us free: We can then do it ourselves and can do with it what we think is right. Otherwise, someone else must always knit, read, calculate, think, decide, etc. for us.” (p. 45)

“Where there is no stimulation …”

Not all children move through this with the same ease, some do not understand something and get into trouble: “The didactic art is to dose these subject-related crises of understanding in such a way that they challenge the pupils, but do not overtax them.”(p. 57) Often a broader subject-related understanding is needed to support children and adolescents whose “crises of understanding” are more persistent or who are conspicuous in class because of a hectic restlessness that visibly impairs their ability to concentrate. A deeper understanding on the part of the teacher can open the door to giving such children a perspective instead of giving them a diagnosis and stopping them in their tracks, as is common today. Or as Krautz says: “Also children lacking in concentration have become such in the first place. But it is not a disease.” (p. 61) The same applies to children from so-called educationally disadvantaged homes. Here, too, schools are called upon to provide stimulation and broaden horizons if the so often-heard postulate of equal opportunities is not to remain an empty phrase:
  “Where there is no stimulation, there is less development. That precisely is the task of schooling: to give all children opportunities for development through stimulation”. (p. 65) For the schools’ task must not be limited to “skills training”.

“Education needs not only closeness, but also distance”

However, it is precisely with such children that support in school succeeds best when close cooperation with parents or other important relationship persons becomes possible. Not all children can fall back on reliable, courage-giving relationships that enable them to build up self-confidence, turn to learning in peace and explore the world. Attachment research has turned its attention to this topic and has recognised the importance of secure attachment for a healthy personality development. However, this should not be understood as constantly and directly fulfilling the child’s material and emotional desires. “It is precisely the attachment theory which shows that education needs not only closeness, but also distance – the distance to look beyond the child to its tasks in our world. From these tasks, our own educational attitude can be meaningfully derived.” (p. 85) This means encouraging the child to be independent according to its age and allowing it to make its way in the world. In the words of Krautz: “Go out into the world, I am inwardly with you and will help you where it is necessary. But you can and must cope with things yourself.” (p. 83) Otherwise, the child’s natural willingness to cooperate would be ignored and possibly even paralysed by excessive praise. “The enormous implications of this finding have not yet been illuminated at all from a pedagogical point of view ...” (p. 87)

“Will the investment in your learning be profitable?”

This is why it is urgently necessary to review the teaching concepts that have been in vogue for decades. Because “teaching is not a technical wheelwork, but a cooperation of people”. (p. 97) Nor should it be guided by the question: “Will the investment in your learning be profitable? ‘Human capital’ is what the education industry calls it.” (p. 119) Such concepts of education based on industrial optimisation processes are far removed from human needs and shy away from current scientific knowledge. They are but a tragic remnant of what education should and ought to be.
  They are “... a way of running schools supposedly trimmed for ‘quality’ and ‘efficiency’, ludicrously bureaucratised and controlled, often concerned only with formal trappings”. (p. 121) And in addition we must not forget the political dimension of these reform processes, because behind the economistic talk there is a social vision that must also be critically questioned.

“Those who bluster about educational reforms
 and educational revolutions of all kinds”

The main victims of this development are children and young people who have a complicated learning biography and are in urgent need of specific support embedded in a binding relationship, instead of being placed in whitewashed inclusion settings that are hardly ever subject to independent scrutiny: “But children are not laboratory animals. Where animal experiments are quite rightly discussed, human experiments should be taboo all the more. For these children with special needs have not only learned less in real life, but have experienced failure.” (p. 125) This is an accusation that today’s educational leaders must face.  Especially in Switzerland, they must also disclose with what aim they have subjected our elementary school, which has its genesis in the social-historical development towards direct democracy and has also created the conditions for this, to these reform processes. “Those who bluster about educational reforms and educational revolutions of all kinds must always allow themselves to be asked what progress in education and upbringing is actually supposed to be.” (p. 131)

“There is a push for renaissance”

For teachers, the renaissance of school is linked to the question of meaning, as Krautz notes: “The question of meaning, what can what I teach actually mean for people, is something I have to ask myself first of all as a teacher. Then I will have the right attitude towards teaching and can design lessons in such a way that they contain possible answers to the question of meaning.” (p. 101) What Jochen Krautz captures in his book in an easy-to-read, condensed form are the fundamental pedagogical pillars of every educational process. They must once again become the basis of educational concepts. The book is recommended reading for all those honestly interested in pedagogical, contemporary historical, political and human issues. Then it is justified to believe in “the spectre of pedagogical hope”, which the author addresses in his last chapter: “It does not urge revolution, but renaissance.” (p. 137)  •

* Jochen Krautz, Professor Dr, Professor for Art Education at the Bergisch University of Wuppertal; President of the Society for Education and Knowledge; main fields of work: art education and art didactics, general education and education policy.