Selfish System: School

I’m currently reading Peter Sloterdijk’s inspiring essay “Du musst dein Leben ändern” (“You Must Change Your Life”, referring to a poem of Rainer Maria Rilke with the same title) on the meaning and importance of ‘social immunization’ and exercise in human history.

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At one point of his investigation he goes into the (German) school system – and as he hits the nail on the head, I don’t want to keep Sloterdijk’s appropriate criticism of school from you:

“As the school during the last decades no longer came up with its since the 17th century persistently proved courage for dysfunctionality, it transmuted into a ‘selfish system’ that orientates itself solely to norms of the own establishment. The school produces teachers that only remind of teachers, subjects that only remind of subjects, pupils that only remind of pupils. In doing so the school becomes in inferior way ‘anti-authoritarian’, without ceasing to formally exercise authority. As the law of learning by imitation is not to be suspended, the school risks – from its unwillingness to represent exemplarity – to make the example that is repeated in the next generation. The consequence is that in the second, third generation almost exclusively teachers will appear that only celebrate the self-referentiality of education. Self-referential is education that takes place because it is the nature of the system making it take place. With the differentiation of the school system, a state is reached in which the school knows one single major subject that is called ‘school’. This corresponds to the single external teaching goal: the graduation. Who’s going of such schools has, up to thirteen years long, learned not to take the teachers as role models.”
– Peter Sloterdijk: Du mußt dein Leben ändern