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Swiss schools are in the public eye because, according to an educational researcher, “they are rumbling like never before”. The debate is correspondingly urgent and is also strongly affecting the SRF community. Where are solutions found and who delivers them?
According to the educational researcher, a big problem is the skills of the students at school. At the end of compulsory schooling, a quarter of children cannot read well enough to understand simple texts. Many people also find it difficult to solve simple math problems.
In addition, there is a large gap between children from families with educational backgrounds and families with educational disadvantages. The latter would have a skills gap of almost three years at the end of primary school. Who is to blame? That’s what the SRF community is asking itself.
SAre the teachers to blame?
It would be wrong to assign blame to just one role. Nevertheless, parts of the SRF community wonder to what extent teachers contribute to the education gap. Christoph Stadler questions “how seriously certain teachers fulfill their job…”, while Felix Meyer discusses the role of teachers in the problem: “Why doesn’t the failure of teachers seem to be obvious? That should alert us.”
Parents threaten teachers with a lawyer if things don’t go according to their expectations for the child.
“The big problem is still the pressure from parents”
The situation is certainly alarming, but part of the community sees not the teachers but the parents as partly responsible for the crisis in education. In many schools, the pressure on teachers is growing, says user Beppie Hermann, because parents “threaten teachers with a lawyer if things don’t go according to their expectations for the child,” which user Danièle Enz is also critical of: “The big problem is still there the pressure from parents.”
This pressure in turn means that fewer and fewer trained teachers remain in the profession, which in turn is reflected in a lack of resources. This is also confirmed by Sara Zaugg from the community, who has direct experience from the classroom: “I would like to invite you to our classroom and then show me how I support 25 children individually and accompany them in their topics and interests… alone ?! There are a lot of resources and infrastructure missing! The class sizes would have to be massively smaller.”
In the end it’s all about the resources
Finally, the best thing to do is to listen to the teachers themselves. Both user Mirjam Rhyner and user Hans Joss see the main problem as the lack of teachers.
The school has an educational mission. And only this one. She’s not a jack of all trades.
Are there still possible solutions?
It doesn’t seem so easy to find a comprehensive solution to the problems in education. However, Peter Zurbuchen emphasizes that using the red pencil in education is probably the wrong tactic. Other people in the comments are critical of the technology or the curriculum. But user Miriam Hoss makes it clear: “The school has an educational mission. And only this one. She’s not a jack of all trades.”