Germany is becoming stupid and there is no way out in sight. Federalism condemns education to eternal secondary status.
The OECD has done it again and lambasted the Federal Republic for its progressive stupidity: The current education study confirms that the country of poets and thinkers has worse students than ever before, in arithmetic, writing and reading.
If someone is lying on the ground, you have to kick hard: So the Kaufmännische Krankenkasse KKH has presented a study on children. According to this, one in ten children suffers from language development disorders. For fifteen to eighteen year olds, the increase rate for speech therapy was a superb 144 percent. There are many reasons for this, is it[calledbut one of them is that families prefer to talk to their smartphones rather than to their fleshly counterparts: “Chatting and liking is no substitute for direct communication.”
The condition of the schools is a disaster. If the equipment allows teaching digitally, fear of bureaucracy inevitably arises: data protectionists are doing everything they can to give us a generation of prodigies who are trained on obscure, self-made nonsense programs because they are not allowed to use Microsoft and then fail in industrial reality .
Education helps against practically everything
In short: Germany is rapidly becoming stupid – but strangely not madly angry. Why? Why aren’t thousands of Germans demanding what is their basic right, namely education, and marching in front of the Brandenburg Gate with banners? Don’t you know where it is?
After all, education is great. Education is cortisone, antibiotic and steroid in one: it helps against practically everything. The mega-problems of our society may be complex mazes, but there is always a path, if not an exit, to this answer: education. The examples are endless.
- How does a society protect itself against disinformation on the Internet, against propaganda, lies, fakes and deep fakes, without setting up a state censorship apparatus? Through education!
- How do we protect ourselves from populism, authoritarianism, racism and anti-Semitism? Through education!
- How do we deal wisely with emergencies, be they pandemic or war-related? Through education!
- The ifo Center for the Economics of Education warns that the deficit in mathematics will cost 14 trillion euros by the end of the century. So how do we balance the budget? Through education!
- How do we create social justice and fair opportunities for advancement? Through education!
- How does the German location become more attractive for skilled workers and their children? Through education!
- How do we find smart ways to deal with climate change? Through education!
- How do we ensure that AI is not misunderstood as a license to dumb down? Through education!
- How do we dry up Mario Barth’s ticket sales? Through education!
Talking doesn’t mean acting
Politicians know all this, so they keep promising: more education. The FDP fought an entire election campaign on the issue, education is part of social democracy’s folklore and the CDU even dared to appoint Karin Prien, an education minister, as deputy party leader. The promise of education belongs in political texts like the appendix in the stomach – and unfortunately both are equally effective.
The gap between talking and doing in education policy is toxic. It cuts deep into the public’s trust in the state. But political laziness is not the core of the problem. Talking and acting are not the same because the federal government has no say in education, but would like to have a say. Like many phenomena that are not immediately understood, this one has to do with history and Nazis.
The cultural sovereignty of the states is an alternative to the centrally controlled propaganda in the Third Reich. And the federal aspect is even deeper in our historical bones: When we wrote the legend of the poets and thinkers, Germany consisted of feudal states and imperial cities; even in the Weimar Republic, education and culture remained in the hands of the states. Only the Nazis changed that and the Basic Law turned the whole thing back.
Cooperation? Forbidden!
Today there is even a constitutional “ban on cooperation”. This word sounds like a government satire from The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. Many people wanted to shake it up, from the Left to the FDP to the SPD and some Greens, but they all failed. Sovereign princes do sovereignty things: no country wants to give up sovereignty.
Instead of education, education, education, the most important thing is mine, mine, mine. For decades, Germany has lived in a feverish fantasy of responsibility, in which brats supposedly learn differently than Blagen, Pänz differently than Steppkes, Grumbiere differently than Buan and Madln. Not even the German education system can destroy the brain so much that it believes in this nonsense.
Speaking of cultural differences: Will we ever talk about the fact that the proportion of migrants in schools is 26 percent? Is there a political answer to this fact or do we leave the problem to desperate parents and the AfD?
That’s why education is not a mega issue
For decades, the federal diffusion of responsibility opened up space for many ideological experiments on the backs of children. Federalism condemns the issue of education to eternal secondary status. Education does not dominate election campaigns, education is never dangerous for a federal government, and no federal politician has to bear responsibility for lousy education policy. The federal government points to the states – and they point to the federal government. There will hardly be a shift in education in Germany.
Some parents, those with options, are beginning to ponder whether the Federal Republic is still the right place for children. The “Welt” correspondent Robin Alexander reports in the podcast “Machtwechsel” about a couple who have just decided on Singapore as their center of life because they don’t want to send their newly born child to German hovels later on.
Maybe we’d rather move to the Brandenburg Gate instead of Singapore. If that’s not clear, that’s at Pariser Platz, 10117 Berlin.