7. Education System
7.1 Goals
After dealing with healthcare in the previous chapter, we now turn to a system that is even more important, and should also be more vivid for most readers.
More vivid because we don't have to imagine what impact changed working conditions for doctors will have on us patients. Instead, this chapter focuses on the students as the learners. The teachers, as organizers and facilitators of knowledge, are of course important as well. But the students are the ones doing the real work: learning new things. And each of us has spent quite a few years as a student, so we can all easily imagine how well a particular learning environment would have worked for us.
More important because it is absolutely crucial to whether a society functions. If the healthcare system is bad, then that's tragic, due to all the suffering caused for no reason and the shorter lifespans. But as long as there aren't mass protests about it, society still functions. A bad education system, on the other hand, can drag society into the abyss, even without protests. If well-trained young people don't enter the job market, then the economy will shrink because there will be a shortage of skilled workers everywhere. If children don't learn critical thinking, then as adults they will believe fake news, and the resulting conflicts can tear apart families, friends, and ultimately the entire society. If children don't learn how to properly handle extreme situations like medical emergencies, natural disasters, and war, then the whole society reacts with panic when such a scenario actually occurs.
We have said that our futurities should be resilient. That means that our education system imparts the necessary knowledge so that children can cope well with adverse circumstances later in life. But even beyond extreme situations: I am convinced that the education system can prepare us for life far better than it currently does (once again using Germany as reference point)45.
Given the importance of the education system, I want to state one thing up front: It is correct and appropriate to spend more on the education system than we currently do in Germany. In the futurities “Universal Basic Income” and “Healthcare”, I have reshuffled existing expenditures, and thanks to increased efficiency, they should even be able to save money. Education is so central that there should actually be more money spent on it.
I primarily want to use this money to train and hire more teachers in order to achieve a better student-teacher ratio. In Germany, the average class size is about 24 students, so the student-to-teacher ratio is 24:1.[35]
In this futurity, I am aiming for classes of 20 students, but always supervised by two teachers simultaneously, which means a student-to-teacher ratio of 10:1. In return, many of the teacher's tasks outside of actual teaching will be distributed to other people. Thanks to this, it won’t require 2.4 times as many teachers as currently employed, as the teaching proportion of their working time will be higher (in Germany in 2016 it was only 35%[36]).
Nevertheless, we will spend more money on more teachers and on the education system as a whole.
Currently, education in Germany is the responsibility of the individual states. Which leads to children having major problems adjusting to the new school system and catching up on material they suddenly lack (due to differing curricula) when moving from one federal state to another. And in the labor market, the school-leaving certificates from the various federal states then have to be compared, even though they were obtained in different ways.
I don't think any of that makes sense. I want to try to design one unified, good system that will then be applied throughout society. As long as you stay in the same country, moving should be as painless as possible for the children. And qualifications from anywhere should be directly comparable.
I regard flexibility as the most important goal for my new school system. In Germany, this exists to a limited extent: The child attends lower secondary school (Hauptschule), intermediate secondary school (Realschule), or college-preparatory school (Gymnasium). Depending on their previous grades and what the teachers recommend. There are schools with different profiles, such as music or science. The child can choose from two or three foreign languages. And in later years, they can drop certain subjects.
But apart from these singular choices, added to the system over time, the class as a whole learns in lockstep, so to speak, everyone the same material. How good or bad you are changes your grades, but only in extreme cases anything else about your school career. The other choices, such as type of school and school profile, are largely individual, permanent decisions. Once you're going to a certain school, it's very difficult to switch again. And if a child does it anyway, they lose all the friends they had made at their old school.
Instead of gradually adding flexibility, I want to try to embed it in the core of the school system from the very beginning. If we succeed in allowing students to learn faster or slower according to their abilities, then grades will no longer be necessary (since no one is interested in them later on anyway). Instead, a gifted or diligent child completes the material more quickly and thus free to tackle new learning material.
I would like to reiterate that nothing in this draft will be unchangeable. The goal is to make meaningful assumptions, continue painting with them, and see what picture emerges. Once and if anybody actually gets down to implementing it, they will of course look at their specific circumstances and adjust the picture accordingly.
What key elements shape this futurity should become clear enough, and I will also emphasize it in my description.
With these goals in mind, let's get to it!