The course of the world is inherently difficult to understand, but at the moment you can’t see through it at all. This also applies to that message German press agency, which shows that despite climate change and rising temperatures, Bavarian schoolchildren are less and less likely to be out of heat. But, one thinks, isn’t that clearly defined? The Ministry of Education replies that there is no legal regulation. The decision is the sole responsibility of the school administration.
The fact that “Wärmefrei” is going out of fashion is not least due to the fact that many schools are now equipped with air conditioning. Also because of the half-day and full-day care, many children can no longer be sent home at short notice. “There is no such thing as heat-free for all students in a school anymore,” says Simone Fleischmann, President of the Bavarian Teachers’ Association.
In old Prussia things were even more casual. In 1892, the Minister of Education at the time issued a decree that lessons were to be canceled whenever the thermometer (in Bavaria: the thermometer) showed 25 degrees in the shade at 10 a.m. Today there are no longer any such general limit values, which is quite logical: here the cooling masonry of an old school building from the Wilhelminian era, there the glass fronts of modern but poorly planned school buildings, which look like magnifying glasses.
30 degrees in the shade – that used to be the heat-free mark
In the 1970s, the heat was almost always released when the 30 degrees in the shade approached. The thermometers were usually attached to a cool outside wall of the school building. In the smoking corners that still existed at the time, the smoking students, even without A-levels, came up with the idea of using a lighter to heat up the thermometer to such an extent that the limit value was reached early.
And then it was off to the swimming pool or a river, where the young people often experienced strange things that they never forgot throughout their lives, which fulfilled the noblest purpose of school lessons. An example is the author Anna Glockshuber, who, as she writes in the rivers book of the Lichtung Verlag, experienced a tragi-comic accident on the Vils.
After a farmer had exchanged his oxen for a bulldog, he drove the unfamiliar vehicle across a meadow straight towards the Vils. He didn’t know what to do other than screaming “Brrrr, Brrrrr” more and more desperately. In the end he just threw up his arms and rushed into the river with a final “Brrrr”. Kind of a pity about this heat free, it was a great school for life.