The future of education - Approaches to solving the problems in education

We are treading water. Germany is still resting on its high lead. Without question, the automotive industry is only doing well today because it had an enormous head start. For years, core topics such as electromobility were missed, almost suppressed by its strong lobby. It is only thanks to well-filled corporate coffers and a technological lead that we have managed to catch up with the mobility of the future. This had nothing to do with early, innovative thinking and action.

But that will be our undoing. What will happen when our lead in technology is overtaken and the research budgets of German companies are empty? When today’s elementary school students encounter a world that demands strong IT skills, critical and innovative thinking, and the courage to take initiative.

And this is precisely where our weakness lies: Our education system is built on uniformity, discipline, diligence and even more diligence. After graduating from high school, we are drilled further, learning, accumulating knowledge, writing exams. Life is firmly planned out until our mid-20s, school, studies, career entry, and any innovation in the minds of our youth is nipped in the bud.

Instead, our schools have become training centers for the working world, where we sort out early on who gets to do which work later. Before the age of 10, children are judged as to whether they will do research to find a cure for cancer or whether they will be trained to become car mechanics. This classification is not only unfair and disadvantageous, especially to children from low-income families; it is based on a world in which „work“ was the same for several generations, in which children had to learn from adults and then copy them.

For children to be especially good at learning and then imitating, they had to be able to do two things in particular: Have discipline and be hardworking. But we live in an enormously fast-paced world; work has changed a lot in the last two decades alone because of the Internet, and will change much faster. Don’t misunderstand: We still need knowledge, discipline and diligence. Especially in fields such as medicine and law, where the preparation of doctors and lawyers largely consists of „catching up“ with the knowledge of the previous generation.

In contrast, in today’s innovations and disruptive technologies such as cloud, digital worlds around metaverse and cryptocurrencies, in marketing, FinTech and other startup paradises, we are left behind primarily because we lack the innovative power, the courage for disruptive solutions and the creativity.

In addition, this dichotomy of education now largely feeds the academic path. Germany has been experiencing a shortage of skilled workers for years, and the training sector is weakening (6), not least because of poorer salaries. This would not be a problem if we took in enough new skilled workers from abroad, because I doubt that many Germans will want to pursue these professions in the future.

However, the way things are going at the moment, we are creating more and more academics, but they do not fulfill the basic skills of an academic. They are hardworking, but will not be competitive in the modern world because they cannot come up with innovative solutions.

So we continue to wait for an American to develop a new technology that will shed a new light on today’s problems. We prefer to concentrate on our discipline, perfecting the innovations of others, instead of trying out creative ideas ourselves. This works well until an even better innovation comes around the corner, which we then have to chase again. This doesn’t work anymore, we don’t have to think existing thoughts further; fossil fuels don’t have to be transported faster, they have to be replaced. Our highways don’t need to get wider, our airplanes don’t need to get faster; more sustainable, holistic alternatives need to be found.