Peter Sloterdijk: Learning is looking forward to oneself

Learning is looking forward to oneself ("Lernen ist Vorfreude auf sich selbsts", McK Wissen 14,Seiten 110.111, http://www.wissen.brandeins.de/uploads/tx_templavoila/mck14_15.pdf )

Translation by Wim Glas, Learning Technologist at UNESCO-IHE Delft, The Netherlands.

Foreword with the translation
I used 'trauma situation' as translation for 'Ernstfall' amongst others in the title of the article, although the official translation is 'Case of emergency' .

Peter Sloterdijk is one of the most important thinkers worldwide. He was mentioned by The Guardian in The 2005 top 100 intellectuals ( http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/2005/sep/30/highereducation.uk3 ). His last book »Du mußt dein Leben ändern. Über Anthropotechnik « ( http://www.metropolism.com/magazine/2010-no1/you-must-change-your-life/ ) contains a chapter on Education called "Maligne Wiederholungen II: Die Erosion der Schule " page 679-685. The article below is a good introduction to that chapter.

Learning is looking forward to oneself
The philosopher Peter Sloterdijk on education for the trauma situation and the de-professionalization of school.


McK Wissen: In recent years, a new education debate was held in this country. What is brewing?
Peter Sloterdijk: Therein lies a potential of irritation for the whole society. You can compare it with painful physical sensation of the individual. Debates and scandals make a thematic nervous system through which society perceives itself.

In the German educational system something is quite wrong for a long time. Why can the public debate take place now?
Because we usually try to push away education issues. They are among the most unpleasant topics. Compared with them, the hospital is absolutely essential pleasant and amusing, like the mass media clearly show. We have endless series of hospital-physician and chief films. These men in green, around the intersect bodies, have become heroes. Intuitively, one would like to say that cannot be, something as unpleasant as an operating room cannot be seen at night in the living room. But no, the people like it. The really unpleasant is the school.

Especially the tests in school are associated with bad memories? Why?
School exams are so unpleasant for many people because they have similarity to birth. In schools people are not detained nine months, but even further brooded for at least nine years.
Then, in this closed situation, they have to fight with examinations. Thus, for modern people, school is something they want to have behind them forever. Only rarely it raises a friendly look back.

That is the trauma situation of birth. But many students feel uncomfortable already in school and not only afterwards.
Maybe. For most children today, school is the initiation into a position where they feel that they do not matter as a person. It is a vaccination program, whereby you are hurt until you have gone through all of the vaccinations - and then you get your narcissistic high school diploma. The message is: Whatever you may think of yourself, you're not important. One does not like to be remembered to such kind of examinations.

This was not always as sharply true as now.
School romance in the movie "The Feuerzangenbowle" ( http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qnXCZK3JQ88 ) can resonate memoirs of not-yet- trauma situations. Today the school has become a serious case of its own art.

Why is it called then: "Not for school, for the life we learn"?
This sentence from the beginning was a protective claim. The original school in ancient times has allowed the students to learn for school, because for the life you did not have to learn according to the Greco-Roman view. Life is his own teacher, it is self-explanatory. School meant, on the other hand, leisure, and leisure was seen as the quintessence of life.

Leisurely learning has nothing to do anymore today. Why?
The enslavement of the school by the modern nation-state introduced the trauma situation principle in school learning: one prepared in school for professional activities. The German concept of education as it was formed in 1800 by the Prussian Neo-humanism still tried to bring into balance the classic and the modern concept: you learned for the school and for life. Already the company was waiting at the doors, but the school held its own status high as a life form in its own right. "The Feuerzangenbowle " is the symbol of that compromise. Meanwhile, however, immigration of the trauma situation case progressed much further in the classroom. We will not see any new feuerzangenbowle anymore.

At the time of Feuerzangenbowle the students felt like a cog wheel in a big machine. The "Do what you want" counter-movement also has not continued. Today we have students who do not know what they want.
This undoubtedly has to do with the fact that, nowadays, the teachers do not know what they are raising children for. The disorientation of modern society of its own goals takes place in the irritation system called school more than anywhere else - except perhaps in the field of fine arts. School and the art are thematic nervous systems of the society in which the confusion over the question of how to go further is articulated very clearly. On average teachers can be no different than the society they come from.

How might the situation of teachers improve?
Teachers are people who often believe that it is always better to explain something than to do something. This leads to schools as psychosocial habitat with an atypical density of hesitant, privatization liking, under-motivated people. One can only react to this with the de-professionalization of school. One has to intensify student's social skills and free them from the factual side.
It turns out more clearly that one does not reach the core of learning with the traditional school methods. All the people who have become something at school, are not really made something by the school, but despite the school, because the school did not bother them there. School has, if it went well, offered protection under which the intense learning processes could flourish, which are always of auto didactical (self-taught) nature. Therefore, under the guise of teaching, the Self-taught can, at times, unfold. But I believe this constellation has moved out from its optimum. One would have to create new optimal situations for the auto-didactic (self-taught). The school does probably not belong to these optima.

How could the school again become such a place?
We need a school that emphasizes the attachment of young people and that does not colonize students with regard to the trauma situation case. We must close the doors for companies, industry, fashion and other nuisances and rebuild a habitat, in which people connect with their own intelligence into a libidinal relationship. What one clearly sees with the infant is usually lost with the school child. The rescue of the cognitive libido should be the core project of school. I personally experience this with my daughter. She goes into the second class of the Montessori-branch of an ordinary primary school. There, the learning libido is assumed to be the real capital.

What do the parents say?
"Do you not give the children a false picture of life?" - "Could not you bring some more structure?" - "Could you not be a bit more stringent?" In these kinds of comments you can see how "Realists" try to enforce their climate monopoly. In doing so, the children lose their curiosity, enthusiasm, this invaluable medium of looking forward to themselves, in the learning process. This looking forward the own state-to-come is what matters. A teaching method that respects this, works quite differently and with greater success than a school that has educators with the attitude: later, you will wonder, and I am the one that will show you.

What could be done about this attitude?
I think it's time, that the work that Nietzsche has done for the priest is going to be done for the teachers as well. The teacher is an under-criticized instance, who is entitled to undergo a liberating and destructive criticism. At the same time, people usually make the false accusations to teachers.

For example, the accusation of laziness.
The one using that accusation is itself lazy.

It may be true for a lot who have actually put themselves to rest, often as a result of excessive demand. But the teaching profession is already a structurally over-exposure case.
So you have to help teachers with an adequate criticism. The analysis of job-related injuries and experience of failure is as necessary as the analysis of resentment against the occupation. That would be clarification of the most valuable Art. One must connect with teachers to renew the school from its strong position , to its regenerative, enthusiastic source-of-energy-point. This enlightenment must appear strong, and state: Here we offer chances, here is our knowledge, our art of living - to all this we invite you. The gesture of invitation is perhaps the most important thing. Through this, the schools become, so to speak, Inns of knowledge and attractions for the intelligence.

Would that be the end of compulsory education?
We have to break with the most harmful of all the old European concepts: with the metaphor of the simple transferability of knowledge. This concept of infusing knowledge is theoretically wrong, it is morally wrong ... ... ...

... not plausible according to cognitive psychology, ..... yet the school is built around this idea, to this truly cursed and harmful thoughts of transfer of knowledge. But this is exactly how the learning does not take place. We must recognize that we are dealing with people who often are finished in their own particular way. Up to this point complete and with no real shortcomings.
The next state can only come from internal activities of that what is already finished. Here, a teacher can, really, only disturb, unless he/she becomes something like a host, a coach or - in the good sense - a seducer, who is already where the child takes the next step. In such guest houses a pact with the principle of -looking forward to- could be closed. With this dynamic libido, which illuminates one's own flourishing, pedagogy should make an alliance again.

Is there no risk that the children learn anything?
What people learn is, first of all not so important, more significant is the fact that they enter into a climate in which they are made aware that their learning abilities, as such, are their best chances of a lifetime.
This climate-building work, in my opinion, is indispensable for the moral regeneration of our society.

We are currently far away from that.
We create situations for young people today, in which they have everything at hand and fancy nothing. We lose more than ten years in primary education process, the better students will need another ten years after the first education track for a second track to find themselves again.
If all goes well, we end up with an original 30-year-old who, after school and regeneration can start his/her own CV as atmospherically-creative person.

Are other nations better?
The problem is exacerbated in Germany. The catastrophe of National Socialism, with these enormous perversions of collective enthusiasm has resulted for us in an abstinence from community-energies. In the French culture, in the Anglo-Saxon, and in the U.S. the school system is under another climate. There, the relationship between the institution and the animating public spirit is much more pronounced. We have a highly bureaucratized school atmosphere, always associated with resignation and dogmatic skepticism. In our high-school, some time ago, we had to deal with the problem that some students, due to a restructuring in various fields of study, had to suffer from certain restrictions and disabilities.

You are talking now of the National Academy of Design in Karlsruhe, of which you are the Rector?
Right. What happened? 120 students are applying for two additional semesters of their studies, because they feel themselves to be victims of the move to the new house, which provides them with one of the greatest high-school building in Europe, not even mentioning the best possible teaching body and fabulously low teacher-pupil proportions. The attraction to describe one's own life in the light of disadvantaging, is now so strong that already young people have developed this exemplary retired, resigned behavior in connection with aggressive, moral demanding as natural behavior. One should, on the contrary, try to bring them to the idea of the entrepreneurial life, so that they do not, at the age of twelve, act like social insurance holders.

Could the current educational debate change that?
Yes. We need this debate because companies have no center and no ego; they only have public openness as a medium for self-alert and self irritation. We also have to -understood from a well understood entrepreneurial idea- - a life entrepreneurial idea-- reanimate the public services. Then we will perhaps see a new generation of teachers develop. I think the impetus for that must come from artists and from the free media. Philosophy and Art set the tone, they reset the general atmospheres.

Perhaps we should start with the architecture of schools. With the classrooms, in which we all sit in rows.
The 19th Century has built schools, museums and barracks. These are three types of glasshouses for social synthesis that make use of State techniques for shaping people. You have to free the school from this tradition. It is to be hoped that, in the years to come, the idea of a new school will be politicized to such an extent that a new phase of experimentation can begin.
If we only would have had the good fortune to get a real, productive educational scandal in a short time.

... could happen, Pisa stays finally ...
... then one could after the reaction phase, in which one has to denounce the obligation and the tendency to complain, enter into a productive discussion and try to design a school that is at the height of our knowledge. Concerning the accumulation of discomfort, the time is ripe. But concerning the positive forces, we will have to recollect what is left, only to regroup and to see if there is enough for an offensive.

How to start? With the teachers? Should they get life, the trauma situation -with practitioners- into the schools?
That would be a first step. I think it would not be too difficult to show that interesting people are more fascinating than any-average entertainment. We do not know the interesting people of our own society. This means that our society does not know itself and does not know that they do not know. When this enthusiasm for interesting people prevails, it will also bring new learning processes into the schools.
At the end of which one picks strong people with interesting activities in the classroom. That would be a far-ranging movement for de-professionalization of teaching.

Parents will be afraid their children do not learn anymore.
Panics from the suspicion that, at the qualifications concessions will be made, can be addressed if one makes clear that nothing is so forming (enriching) as the opportunity to see successful people from nearby. This is, incidentally, also true for the art schools and the master class principle. There, students can see successful artists make art in their craft and can monitor their success curve. This is instructive in all circumstances, regardless of whether the student responds by connecting positive or with rejection. Both are equally informative, provided you have a genuine chance to watch a creative person in action.

So also learn by Decline?
If students have a chance to form productive skepticism towards a position of success, it is never lost time. Even those who turn away have copied a lot. Perhaps we live in an age in which people learn more by rejection than by imitation. The cowardly teachers are the bad teachers. The good teacher is the one that opens him/her self for rejection.

Here we reach Sloterdijk's term "De-idiotisizing": showing your own stupidity, because how else would you get rid of it?
How else would you get rid of them, if not in dealing with potential imitators that are so clever to refuse at the last minute, the imitations?


Peter Sloterdijk is rector of the National Academy of Design in Karlsruhe, where he also holds a professorship in philosophy. He also teaches at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna.




"Beat the drum, and fear not ..." This quotation from Heinrich Heine, Peter Sloterdijk, 1983, published in front of his "Critique of Cynical Reason". The two-volume book is the most sold philosophical work in the history of Germany.
We children of the Enlightenment and capitalism, according to his critic, have discussed and debunked everything and ourselves- and now we do the wrong thing with the right consciousness. 20 years later he wrote: "The philosophers have been circling the world in various ways, what is comes down to now is, to land on it."