Please don’t drift off into visions!
Visible consequences of integration policy
by Carl Bossard*
(17 November 2022) “Was there something?”, many ask. A teacher shortage? An emergency situation? Those responsible for education act as if nothing had happened – and take refuge in visions. Some are amazed angrily.
It’s been the same picture for years: just before the summer holidays, school administrators are flustered and there is a frantic search for teachers. Nothing but loud silence from the central staffs. Those responsible on the ground, on the other hand, are fighting for every available assistant. The schools must be able to start after the holidays, the children must have a teacher in front of them. With enormous efforts, they succeed. People without training are also hired. The education officials take it in their stride. The caravan moves on.
Where is the focus on the concrete?
Why this trembling again and again? Why this sad spectacle? One can only speculate and interpret – and ask oneself: is education policy at all interested in the quality of our schools and the concrete teaching on the ground? Anyone who listened to the NZZ panel on the topic of “Performance society – what kind of school does man need?” in mid-September has serious doubts.1 The course of the discussion speaks volumes: there was a lot of talk about visions and about developing children’s potential better and more humanely, and above all there were calls for even more funding – in what is already the most expensive education system in the world.
The director of education in Zurich, Silvia Steiner, stated: “The Swiss school system is basically on a very good path. We have a huge support and promotion system, we have the instruments to make corrections.” Not a (self-)critical word, no comment on the worries and hardships on the pedagogical ground floor, no general view across school’s deficits and the fact, for example, that even intelligent children often have large gaps in the basic skills of arithmetic and writing at the end of primary school. If they have mastered these basics, it is not uncommon that it is thanks to dedicated parents or private learning institutes – and unfortunately far too few lessons that are effective for learning. Incidentally, about 35 per cent of pupils today receive private tuition. It goes without saying what this means for the supposedly so important equality of opportunity.
Scandal: an education policy that negates everyday life
There is also no mention of the consequences of integrating very different, sometimes very difficult children into the same class – with horrendous administrative coordination costs and sometimes serious disruptions to teaching. The “Beobachter” even speaks of “tohubohu in the classroom” and of the fact that today there is hardly a class “in which one can concentrate on teaching school subject matter”.2 But who is surprised when Zurich’s education director Silvia Steiner takes integration as given, in the sense of a human right. Steiner literally: “For me, inclusive education is not a project, but a human right.”3 For ideological reasons, any adjustment or correction is out of the question. For dogmatic reasons, there’s only one thing to do: to carry on as before! Collateral damage and serious learning deficits in basic cultural competencies or not.
And this approach to teaching is one of the reasons for the noticeable flight of many teachers from the classrooms. Those in charge choose to ignore this too. Their motto: hear nothing, see nothing and say nothing – this is the scandal of an education policy that takes refuge in visions and negates everyday life while pretending that everything is fine – as has been the case for years with early French, for example.
Certain deficits are caused by a systemic failure
What would be needed? Many people miss a critical-analytical (clear) view of the current state of affairs in Swiss education policy, meaning a systemic and radically honest one. For years, schools have been restructured and reformed – in hundreds of individual steps. What has been the overall result of these innovations? And why does Switzerland constantly fall behind in international comparative studies?
To give just one example: it is not acceptable that one in five of our 15-year-olds leaves school without the necessary basic language skills. This is simply “a systemic failure”, as Stefan C. Wolter, Director of the Swiss Coordination Office for Educational Research, puts it. He adds: “With an average class size of 19 pupils, two to three pupils per class in Switzerland can read and write inadequately when they leave school”. Those responsible for education remain silent. The systemic failure does not seem to bother them. Hardly anyone asks for the reasons why.
A critical look at teacher training colleges
A second important focus would be on the question of where mistakes are made in training and why so many young teachers leave the classroom so quickly: seven percent per year, most in the first three to five years of their careers. We know that we don’t have too few trained teachers; we have too many who leave the profession too quickly or don’t even take it up. The teacher training colleges have become a kind of flow-through for people who don’t want to teach at all. This raises the question: how well prepared are the new teachers for good teaching, and how well trained are they when they start their first job?
A return to pedagogical freedom
And there is something else that needs to be analysed: how burdensome are the many top-down reforms of the past years? Education has been “standardised” and “administered”. Organisational issues dominate pedagogical issues. The burden on teachers has increased as a result of these reforms, with the growing integration and getting bogged down in a multitude of subject areas.
Many teachers feel trapped in the corset of an artificially constructed complexity that they can no longer cope with. That is why fewer and fewer want to take on the important position of a class teacher. Much, too much, is stipulated and imposed from above – or controlled. This minimises pedagogical freedom. And freedom is part of every teacher’s DNA.
A ruthlessly honest systems analysis
We know: not everything is running smoothly at our primary school. Far from it. Unfortunately, a lot of things are swept under the carpet or are only mentioned behind closed doors. This does not get us anywhere. What we need, however, is neither aesthetic illusions nor any visions that are far removed from practice; what we need is an honest systems analysis, unsparing and radically reality-based. We will not get anywhere with the “as-is” approach we have been using up to now. It is always the pupils who suffer in a school system.
| * Carl Bossard, 1949, former principle of the cantonal college in Nidwalden, director of the cantonal college in Lucerne, founding principle of the college of education Zug (PH Zug), lecturer at the college of education in Zug. Today he is active as a course instructor, speaker and school councillor. Carl Bossard regularly comments on education policies and pedagogy. |
(Translation “Swiss Standpoint”)
1 Matthias Niederberger: Welche Schule braucht der Mensch? In: NZZ, 17 September 2022, p. 15: The panel, chaired by NZZ editor Martin Meyer, consisted of Margrit Stamm, educationalist, Silvia Steiner, Zurich Education Director, Sergio P. Ermotti, Chairman of the Swiss Re Board of Directors, and Oliver Meier, Building Project Manager Marti AG.
2 Julia Hofer: Tohuwabohu im Klassenzimmer. In: Beobachter 25/2021, p. 92f.
3 Nils Pfändler, Lena Schenkel: “I don’t believe in visions for the future of the school”. Interview with Silvia Steiner, in: NZZ, 28 January 2019, p. 15.