A long fruitless crusade

[matrixmann]

Regarding the zeitgeisty mumbo jumbo surrounding a 16-year-old girl from Sweden named Greta Thunberg, it's always good to remember the past and bring it upon the table: There have been other environmental activists before, acting even more fierce than her and following a recognizable agenda instead of a plain social media hype that still lacks

Comments

[matrixmann]

Found the way to the Leseprobe.

Hm... I have to perform some efforts in order to get my head into this as the school system that my brain mostly got taught with (thankfully) was very different.
To say the least: It has one advantage having started with school in the 90s still. You wanna know why?
Because then it still took time for the West German system to write new frameworks for the former GDR ones which would soon be abandoned.
For example: I've never got to know that nonsense called "Schreiben nach Hören" or "Lesen durch Schreiben". Learned it through conventional methods, and qualitywise I think it's a good base. It even still helps me today acquring knowledge and skills in other languages.
I cannot imagine what a kind of trashing the brain it must be if you learned it through one of the other methods...

Later on, as far as I know, they also made those new G12 A levels in this federal state easier for the years following up. There were a couple of things you could already get to hear as you were in the final year (with the new G 12 system) which the next one wouldn't have to put up with anymore to acquire their diploma.
And I'm already outta this for hardly more than a decade now... So who knows what they've all made easier since then.
Only thing I still keep as a reproach to that is: That way they've restructured the old A level system, they would have done the students a pretty favor to stay with the one year more to get through this. Because the way that I saw it in practice was: If you took it a bit serious, get yourself a USB-interface on your neck and put in the correct stick for the class. Because so much stuff you should learn in that few time, and then always you had to do any long-time task at home besides, it just fucking wore you out and made you go insane. This was no more any of this shit "Abitur for free with art and English as major classes"...

Well, back to yours - I'm straying...

...I guess I can see what you mean in connection with Greta. Who knows if she really has Asperger's? Who knows if her behavior and the way she thinks doesn't get artificially pathologized? (These days all kids with some brains strangely get diagnosed with anything quickly.)
Your son wasn't originally divergent, he just only was cleverer compared to the average of the other kids - this partly due to you two (as parents) teaching him basic skills from an early age as he demanded for intellectual input.
And this was artificially turned into a problem by the school system for whatever reason. It wasn't one to him.

Like if somebody demands you to take good care of something, and then if you really do that, he gets furious and shouts at you: "Damn, I didn't want you to take that seriously!".
Too few is undesired, but too much is undesired as well.

[vit_r]

This book is not about my son. It contains the thoughts and conclusions of my son. The characters and the world are artificial. However, there are a lot of real impressions that were used in the story. And it describes not the school system but the consequences of its degradation and seeks the ways to correct this.

Or case was quite specific and it is not described in the book. And to understand what do I mean about Greta you need to read through the book till the 31st chapter. This phenomenon is also one of the consequences.

By the way, the weirdest complaint of the Swiss school was that my other son knows the German (Hochdeutsch) too well.

[matrixmann]

Good, okay.

But, I must say, the first chapter, as president and ministers are discussing among each other "how to we get some normal workers out of people again" - it bears similarity to a overall picture that one finds here in the present.

Only, German system until now doesn't care about any kind of education of its own masses. They rather plunder other countries for "skilled workers" and put their bets on the horse "pay expensively for good education" (aka "the American model"). Its own youth - they let their brains get filled with rubbish and become addicted to their smartphones.
The very last thing they'd get upon doing would be investing any penny meaningfully into their own young people. (They only like to scream for people fertilizing some.)

[vit_r]

The German education system burns a lot of money. The catastrophic consequences are not the intention of the politicians but the result of a (parasitic) self-organization. And each attempt of "improvement" makes the situation even worse because the system protects itself. This is the theme of one other book.

I think Swiss education system burns even more money pro person even in the public sector. For a private school you pay more than 2000 CHF per month and receive quite the same service.

[matrixmann]

Hm... If you ask me, its biggest flaw already is that they stick to death on the federal states organizing it. Literally each federal state does its own thing, comparing a single capacity between all of them is like a scientific discipline in itself.
And, on top of that, each federal state changes anything on its concept every few years - like either G12 or G13 (or allowing both), introducing conduct grades, redesigning how the diplomas are written in general and changing the lesson plans a lot.
Certain humanistic subjects even exist only in a couple of federal states - like, for example, the subject "Ethik". Somewhere else the same content is contained within "Philosophie".
I think, even between the school forms the lesson plans must be a bit different. At least this seemed to me to be the case for AWT (Arbeit-Wirtschaft-Technik). Gymnasium lesson plans didn't have a huge emphasis on crafts; you rather had to do with some more academic, economy-oriented stuff. This stuff somehow was unknown to same-year-olds who went to a Gesamtschule.
Later in the reorganized senior classes of the Abitur system, the subject was called only "Wirtschaft" with a direction according to that title.
In other words: Ein ziemliches Kuddelmuddel...

[vit_r]

The federal ownership had helped Bavaria to save their education system from degradation pressure. The centralized government authorities always choose the worst from all bad ideas.

[matrixmann]

Hm... I know the critics vice versa that Bavaria refuses to adapt to a centralized-equal niveau because they literally train for the tasks that appear in the exams, more than really teaching the kids well in an overall sense. That's also why they want no Zentralabitur - because it would come to surface that their students aren't really that superiorly good as it's always said.

[vit_r]

You have not the best sources. You could always make statistics that "prove" anything.

What do you think about medical students that do not learn anatomy and engineers who do not understand mathematics? This is are the "improvements" forced by the centralization.

[matrixmann]

I just happen to know the criticism, not more.

And one thing I don't believe in is that currently any federal system has found the philosopher's stone. They all have some kinds of flaws or critical errors in the depth of the system. Only one of them may sum up more at once than the other.

[vit_r]

Yes. And, unfortunately, nobody really knows what to do with education. Even the methods that are advertised as "alternative" or "best" have own critical flaws.