2017–2019
Schools of Tomorrow 1 & 2
2017–2019
With the Schools of Tomorrow project, since 2017 HKW has been investigating the question of how schools today can become places where a desirable society is built.
Schools are laboratories for tomorrow’s society: but how can they become places where a new future emerges? What social agents are necessary for this? For more than a year, students, artists, teachers, and academics were exploring the question of how schools can be collectively transformed. The ideas from everyday school life and concepts for educational praxis which had been addressed from May 2017 to June 2018 in a Kick-Off Conference, in 21 school projects, and an ideas competition, were brought together in June 2018 in a concluding program: Test Run for the School of the Future. A Student Manifesto compiles the chief demands made by more than 2,000 students who submitted their future visions to the ideas competition. Ten action recommendations for action for teachers and cultural mediators summarize what can be derived from the learning experiments and where participants envision potentials for the evolution of future learning. In 2019, teachers will review the ideas developed in a practice-oriented further education course.
Thereby Schools of Tomorrow looks ahead into the future, but also into the past: One hundred years ago, educational reformers across the globe strove to create the foundation for new methods of learning and teaching. Industrialization, worldwide migration and urbanization led to profound upheavals. In his groundbreaking 1915 publication Schools of To-Morrow the philosopher und educator John Dewey and his daughter Evelyn Dewey laid out his teaching theories based on a series of school experiments in the United States. His educational approach, which intended to prepare students to actively take part in shaping society, continues to have an effect today. Based on Dewey’s ideas, Schools of Tomorrow is examining experimental school practices from the twentieth century in order to develop fields of action and themes that can identify new pathways for learning.
Curated by Silvia Fehrmann
Within the framework of 100 Years of Now.
