Pedagogical School Development Between the New Culture of Learning and the Growing Pressure to Modernize

Abstract

No observer of the educational system can fail to see the conspicuous changes that have taken place in public schools since the 1970s in the German-speaking countries as well as internationally. They foretokened a further transformation of the school, which we are now witnessing directly. The following reflections are aimed, first of all, at rendering intelligible the developments in the school system—both those that have already taken place and those on the horizon—against the background of worldwide social change, which we will call "globalization," or from a sociological perspective, the "second modern age." However, the related dynamic, which affects schools as well, not only follows the line of the reform movement and the alternative school movement of past years, whose efforts were directed toward making learning more meaningful, more intensive, and more self-responsible for pupils within the context of the new culture of learning; it also gives emphasis to the increasing economic competition, which must turn to education to raise social productivity and is having a feedback effect on schools generally and on classroom instruction in particular by dint of insistent demands to make the content and organizational forms of education more rigorous and effective. A pedagogically responsible development, which will be discussed in the following text, should not simply give in to such a tendency and functionalize the school for competition in efficiency, both internationally and domestically. Rather, it must strike a balance between the achievements of the school reform movement of the past decades, especially the structuring of the school as a world for social life and the substance of the learning culture that has evolved within it, and the striving for a culture of achievement that promotes the individual, which is also one of the school's genuine tasks. This is sketched out in brief form for seven dimensions of a future school. It will be evident how much the forms of instruction and learning bear the marks of prior efforts to organize the school as a whole.