Field for Experimentation, Educational Center, Learning Factory?

Classroom instruction, educational opportunities and the need to rethink the school – current debates are reminiscent of the educational era of the 1970s. The online discussion explores schools, cities and society in 1970s West Germany and parallels with today.

Current public debates about the importance of classroom instruction, unequal educational opportunities and the need to radically rethink the institution of school (yet again?) are reminiscent in many ways of the educational era of the 1970s, which was characterized by experimentation and expansion. Contributors from the fields of teaching, art and research will speak about educational policy reforms and institutional realities at West German schools in the 1970s. Pedagogical experiments and a “de-schooling” of school and society will be topics as well as the structural conditions of learning and the physical and ideological barriers to which children of migrants were and are subjected.

The panel will trace an arc between the themes of the exhibition Education Shock. Learning, Politics and Architecture in the 1960s and 1970s and Schools of Tomorrow.

Followed by a Q&A session

With Çiçek Bacık (literary scholar, migration researcher, teacher), Claudia Hummel (art educator and curator, Institut für Kunst im Kontext at the Berlin University of the Arts), Ellen Thormann (art historian and author), Moderator: Tom Holert (curator of Education Shock)

Funded by Federal Agency for Civic Education