Article:

Digitale Schule oder humane Schule im Zeitalter der Digitalisierung? Pädagogische Reflexionen zu einem Politikum

In education policy debates, there has been a call not only since today to introduce something like ›digital education‹ as a new school subject and many ministries of education are already in the process of forging corresponding curricula. Klaus Zierer and Christina Schatz caution against following this demand immediately and in its entirety. The evaluation of a large number of empirical studies and meta-studies on the subject revealed that the effectiveness of digital media on learning outcomes had only moderate effects on average. The elementary cultural techniques of reading and writing can be learned much more effectively with paper and pencil or a book in hand than on a laptop or tablet. Media, whether digital or analogue, are teaching aids. The professionality of teachers is and remains decisive for learning success. If teachers use technology for the sake of technology, which is currently not uncommon, empirical studies show that digital media can even lead to negative effects. As a result, when it comes to questions of learning, it becomes clear that a revolution at this level will not succeed through digital technology. Heiko Christians, on the other hand, is convinced that the term ›digital education‹ cannot exist in the first place. Today, repeated reading of canonical texts – as a cultural precondition for education – is a counterintuitive, old usage of the latest technical infrastructures. This use is still not excluded per se, but it is more improbable than ever before. And it is only possible at all as long as this use, which obviously originates from other infrastructures and epochs that have been ›overcome‹ today, is maintained in the user’s memory and in their trained reflexes and constantly made plausible. This, however, is precisely what educational institutions would have to do if they still wanted to carry out their old educational mission. The same institutions that once devoted themselves primarily to the maintenance of various canonical text corpora are today no longer supposed to educate their inmates, but to make them ›fit‹ for the ›digital future‹. In short, this means that there should no longer be any noticeable differences between the technical conditions inside and outside the institutions. The question remains whether one wants to preserve techniques and works from this old book culture or whether education