7. Education System

7.7 Graduation and Vocational Training

The most important goal of the entire education system is to give all children in society, regardless of their background or social status, equal chances and opportunities for self-development—and as many of those as possible. In addition, students are meant to be taught a worldview that is tolerant and free of hatred. Young adults should be able to find their way in our complex world and cope with constant change without falling into depression and permanent stress from being overwhelmed.

I hope it is apparent that I have aligned the entire school system with achieving these goals in mind (see also the curriculum in the appendix).57

To ensure equal opportunity for all students, the school takes on a protective role towards them: each class has two teacher-advisors who help, comfort, and advise. There are school meals (breakfast, lunch, afternoon snack). The school provides all required learning materials (up to and including a laptop). The school building is never locked, and there is always someone present (even if it is just a night watchman). Students are able to stay at school overnight. If needed, simple clothing is provided.

The state, of course, has its own safeguarding system (youth welfare office, etc.). But for the students, the school is the tangible personification of the state—always there, always reliable, even if other state bureaucracy should fail.

Just as every doctor will always help a sick person (Hippocratic Oath), so will every teacher always help their students. Where “their” students are, first and foremost, the 20 students whose teacher-advisor they are, together with a colleague, for five years (either school years 1–5 or 6–10). Beyond that, they will also try to help any other student at the school, and lastly any child of school age on the grounds.

In this way, the school gives its students security and freedom of choice. Being able to choose which learning material they study and when is only a small part of that.

Equal opportunity is the reason why school attendance is compulsory and only state schools are permitted. For the same reason, attending kindergarten is compulsory for children before the start of school: we want to open up the same opportunities to all children, no matter what kind of parental home they come from.

After completing their schooling, a dual vocational training program will then follow—at least for all those who do not go into research.

Each vocational training program will require certain modules at the foundation level as prerequisites. Students learn how this works in the module “Planning”. Anyone who missed taking the right module at school must first make it up at an adult education center. There, all modules are offered over a longer, more spread-out period—both those that were optional at school (Levels 4–6) and mandatory ones (for adult immigrants, people who for other reasons are missing parts of the mandatory schooling, or for refreshing forgotten knowledge). In this way, adult education centers enable lifelong learning or preparation for a different profession. Alternatively, there is also the option of completing modules online (and only taking the assessment on site).

Anyone who completed a competency module at school that is also part of the vocational training will have their training period shortened.

The vocational training takes place in cooperation between a vocational school and a company (or a state institution for teachers, doctors, civil servants, or other state employees). The state can ensure a sufficient number of training places in companies through a reverse auction:
Each company states the level of state funding at which it would be willing to offer a training place in the next school year. The state determines the funding level for each profession and which companies receive this funding (these are the companies that were willing to offer the training for the lowest price, even if they now all receive the same (higher) amount).

I think the basic concept of dual vocational training, which already exists in Germany, is a very good one. With appropriate state funding and guidance—so that in each profession the number of people trained matches what society will need for that profession in the long term—it should also work well in the future. It combines the school-based foundations of a profession, which are taught in a centralized way at the vocational school at the highest possible quality, with the concrete requirements of the respective company, which cannot possibly be molded into perfectly fitting school-based training programs.

I also believe that such a dual vocational training program should be possible for every profession that is not “scientist”—including professions where we typically do not imagine training this way, such as doctor, judge, or engineer. I think that from the start of vocational training onward, theory and practice should always be connected. Of course, learning at the vocational school will not take place in fixed class groups either. Instead it will happen in mandatory and optional modules, just as described for the school in this chapter.

I only want to go into more detail about one single profession: training to become a teacher. After all, this entire chapter has also been about their workplaces.

The underlying module for this profession is “Parenting”. Those who have already completed it in the Competency Version can shorten their training.

Every teacher must be able to teach either fitness or a foreign language after completing their training, for one of school years 1–5 or 6–10. In addition, they must have mastered a minimum number of modules well enough to be able to teach them (with every two small modules counting as much as a large one). Even though a teacher with only one large module of Level 2 or 3 could almost completely fill a school year, it is better to have multiple modules as options. That allows the school to deploy the teacher differently as needed, to give him more variety, and allows students to have different teachers for the same module over the course of the school year. Teachers who will teach school years 1–5 must be able to teach Level 1 (reading, writing, and basic arithmetic). Teachers who will teach school years 6–10 receive additional training in Adventure Education.

In the practical part of the dual training program, at a school, the prospective teacher takes part in fitness, foreign language, or one of the modules they selected in their training (or in Level 1 instruction). They hold lessons together with the two teachers responsible for that group of students, or with just one of them. In this way, the prospective teacher receives feedback on the skills they acquired during their training.

After completing their training and a successful hiring interview at a school that can make good use of their combination of modules, the new teacher’s professional life begins. The new teacher will hold lessons together with an already experienced teacher and form a teaching team, so that he or she continues to receive support.

The teaching materials, the perspectives, and the pedagogical methods of the modules will be regularly revised by the state. The centrally evaluated understanding assessments for each module provide excellent feedback on what works how well. They also make it easy to experiment with new methods in some teaching groups, compare the results, and adjust the module curriculum based on them.

Teachers who completed their training a long time ago are also expected to use new methods and new teaching materials. For this reason, we allocate teachers time to continue their education. The modular structure of instruction greatly increases the efficiency of this further training. Before a teacher teaches a module that they have not taught for a long time, the school will give them a block of time to get up to date with the latest training standard for that module and, in cooperation with their colleague, to newly prepare their own teaching materials. This can happen either during school holidays or in weeks in which these teachers do not teach any module. The same applies at regular intervals to modules that a teacher continuously teaches, as well as to fitness or foreign-language instruction. The refresher training in reading, writing, and basic arithmetic, or respectively in Adventure Education at the beginning of the sixth school year, takes place every five years, before teachers take on a new first or sixth class as teacher-advisors.

Schools will be willing to hire teachers for a reduced number of teaching hours. These teachers could, for example, skip fitness and foreign language in the morning. Or they could teach foreign language or fitness, but then only the module part before or only the one after lunch—together with another teacher who teaches the entire module. Or they could teach only one of the two module parts and the introductions. Since the module parts before and after lunch are of different lengths, many different possible total working hours arise here. The school should therefore be able to respond very flexibly to teachers’ wishes about working hours.

In the following, I describe the workload of full-time teachers who teach foreign language or fitness, followed by a module and an introduction.

The two teachers of each class, their teacher-advisors, are meant to be responsible for the students for five years—either from the first to the fifth school year or from the sixth to the tenth. Teachers who will retire before the end of this period, or who for other reasons are unlikely to remain at the school for that long, do not take on a new class. Apart from that, every five years each teacher takes on a newly enrolled class or a class of sixth years, depending on their profile. Each teacher will therefore teach either fitness or a foreign language in the first two lessons of the day, one of those hours being with the class for which they are a teacher-advisor together with a colleague. During the breakfast break, they will provide food and drink at their table for the same group of students for five years and have an open ear for their worries and concerns.

The teacher may and should build a bond with these students: offering praise and encouragement, comforting them, and giving advice. All of this is allowed and encouraged. The two teacher-advisors are meant to be their students’ first points of contact at school when problems arise—with classmates, other teachers, the learning material, parents, and so on.
If necessary, they will follow up on problems within the school or seek a conversation with the parents.

For the entire five years, a teacher’s primary responsibility at this school will be this class of 20 students.

Even though no one can force them to do so, I think there will be a code of honor in the teaching profession to change schools, if at all possible, exactly when one’s own class has completed their fifth or their tenth school year. Simply because teachers feel responsible for their students and, as teacher-advisors, want to be there for them until the end.

After foreign language or fitness (and the breakfast break), the teacher will teach a module together with a colleague. As an interruption of the module, these two teachers will eat lunch outdoors together with their current students (those attending the module). During this time, each teacher is responsible for the students for 30 minutes and withdraws for the other 30 minutes. Alternatively, both teachers eat at the same time and use the second half of the lunch break, when the children are playing on the grounds, to talk about students and teaching.

About every other week, the teacher will, with a colleague, present one of their modules to new students during the introduction time slot.

Up to this point, a full-time teacher has accumulated an average daily working time of 7 or 7.5 hours (8:00–15:00/16:00, with or without a 30-minute lunch break).

A major change of pace for teachers is when they get to teach the Competency Version of one of their modules, as explained in Subchapter 7.5 “Level 3: Competency Versions” (in that case, their average workday is 30 minutes longer, since they teach until 16:00 every day).

It is very important that we do keep teachers’ backs free from everything else that is not teaching time: they don’t have to prepare or grade homework, tests, or exams. They need much less time for lesson preparation, since in the module they focus on only one topic each day (see Chapter 7.4). Conferences, further training, and similar things will only happen during school holidays, so they do not increase working hours during school weeks. And all other tasks at the school will be handled by staff members other than the teachers, so that the teachers can concentrate entirely on teaching.

Just lesson preparation alone will presumably be still enough for teachers to exceed eight-hour work days. But we are close enough that I think the rest can be handled through compensatory time-off during school holidays. Teacher working hours are complicated even in traditional school systems…

Alongside being well designed, the quality of our education system ultimately stands or falls with the quality of our teachers and educators. Our society will therefore do its best to ensure that teachers, during their training, not only acquire the subject-matter knowledge they need in order to convey the curriculum (which includes both the content itself and teaching methods), but that they are all well able to support children in their development into mature adults. In addition to sufficient knowledge of psychology, this requires them to have internalized the philosophy explained in Chapter 11.5 (“Self-Development”).
The school does include modules such as “Empathy”, “Human Relationships”, and “Network Thinking”, in which these ideas are taught to students in a concentrated form as part of the curriculum. But beyond that, in teachers’ everyday interactions with students, in how they deal with problems and conflicts, the school is meant to continually reinforce and strengthen these ways of thinking and approaching the world—starting with the teachers themselves. The educational mission of the school does not end with the learning material alone; it encompasses the student as a whole person. The goal is to help shape them into a mature, clear-thinking individual who fully develops their potential.

For even if all the systems I present in this book are designed to function with average people as we know them today, the goal of the education system is for the next generation to be able to steer the ship of society far more capably into the more distant future.

Review of Requirements

Requirement	Features of this Futurity
low demands on people’s character	• teacher presence during breaks • teacher training
no world government	unchanged: Even today, countries must cope with different education systems when people immigrate
costs considered	• costs more (team teaching) • explained why we are willing to spend more on education
automatic adaptation to a changing world	• Modules must be revised manually; however, adjustments are far faster than in traditional curricula • New optional modules can be offered without difficulty
help citizens keep up with change	• modules for managing everyday life (Planning, Cooking, Repair, …) • modules for well-being (Empathy, News, Human Relationships, …) • module Network Thinking: “A way of thinking to navigate this complex system with confidence”
promote technological development	• yes, through better educated and more creative citizens
resilience to withstand adversity	• modules First Aid and Survival • crafting modules • broader distribution of knowledge through optional modules: In emergencies, more people possess a needed skill