It is an increasingly common sight on streets and squares, in buses and trains, in restaurants and waiting rooms: small children, often still in strollers, with their parents' cell phones in their hands (or their own, supposedly "child-friendly" gaming tablet). Why do their parents give them this? Probably not, because they want to educate their children through it. But because the children are whining about it, the beams are bending and those around are already looking disapprovingly. Because in many cases the parents simply want to be left alone. Or because they don't know any better.
They should actually know that it is detrimental to their children's mental and emotional development, that they should hand them a picture book and that they might even - what a thought! – could read something from it. Anyone who lectures parents about this will certainly get into a lot of trouble very quickly - and yet they would have spoken a truth that fewer and fewer parents seem to take for granted.
Because it is precisely at this point that education ends and educational misery begins. Parents give in, and not just when it comes to cell phone use, and children come to school without ever holding a pair of scissors, without being able to concentrate properly, without adequate affect control and frustration tolerance, and often without sufficient language skills. In order to be able to work at all, schools necessarily have to compensate for what parents couldn't or didn't want to do.
A colorful bouquet of practical tasks
Federal Education Minister Prien and Chancellor Merz have therefore, with good reason and legitimate questions, resumed a discussion that has been going on since the first “PISA shock” in 2001: What responsibility do parents have? How do you get them to stop expecting more and more services from the school? What role does politics play in this, as it also delegates more and more tasks to schools that parents used to do and ideally should do today?
In addition to the requirements for the children's basic school readiness, schools were and are also given a whole range of practical tasks. The school has always taught handicrafts and crafts, but now it also has to teach the children to swim, sends them to the orthodontist, explains healthy eating, explains how to use media, what a bank account is and what liability insurance is, and so on and so forth. This is all important. But is it a core task of the school?
During the corona pandemic, a serious issue arose: the massive increase in the number of mental illnesses in children revealed that teachers often did not even recognize ADHD and still thought they were dealing with a lot of “fidgets” when children walked over tables and benches. The fact that knowledge is caught up here, both by parents and teachers, is necessary for the well-being of the children, but also for the continuation of lessons. The latest challenge posed by the Internet, AI and social media has now even led to a new school subject being considered: it is not the parents but rather the schools that should prepare children for the “digital world”.
Something has also started to slip among the privileged
It is obviously the case that as the skills, capacities and ambitions of parents decrease, the tasks of schools increase. Secondly, it must be noted that this development has now reached a limit. When schools are so overwhelmed that they can no longer guarantee the teaching of basic skills and even strong students begin to decline, the failure lies not only in the school system, but also in the parents.
And that applies to all parents: Even among the socially privileged, something has started to slip, even particularly severely. Here in particular, the number of casual readers has increased dramatically and the willingness to solve tasks has decreased, even if they are difficult. Parents of privileged children can no longer rely on their children “breathing in” education and ambition at home. They also have to ask themselves whether they want to be too much of a permissive friend and not enough of an educator for their children.
But the truth is that excuses don't help. The decline is not solely due to the excessive use of cell phones or the economic situation of families, nor is it the fact that there are fewer and fewer “housewife mothers” who dedicate themselves to the education and upbringing of their children, or that more and more single parents are overwhelmed by this. There are too many other states, including non-authoritarian ones, that are doing better despite the same developments. A combination of changes in the school system and a greater sensitivity of parents to their educational responsibility would probably be the key to a resurgence.
