Jürgen Kaube is a managing editor and education expert at the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung and the father of three children. His new book was a reaction to his experiences in both these arenas and formulates a provocative thesis: Given how they are currently run, schools are too stupid for our children and built to a fatally flawed design. Schools teach kids things they neither need nor want to learn and will quickly forget. But schools also react far too sensitively to external pressures; the much-vaunted ‘digital classroom’ is as useless as the numerous spelling reforms or the “language laboratory”.
In Kaube’s analysis, we need to pare teaching down to the crucial minimum: schools should teach children how to think, and that’s it. But today’s curricula consist only of things that are easy to set as exam questions. That’s the opposite of good education and teaching how to think. From this provocative standpoint, Kaube goes on to formulate demands which he says will free our schools from unnecessary and distracting burdens.
Jürgen Kaube’s book transcends decades-old discussions about education policy and defies categorization in terms of left/right or conservative/progressive. This timely and provocative book looks set to spark an intense new debate.
