Schools and democracy are of course a huge topic, especially this year in which the Basic Law is celebrating its 75th birthday, in which three state elections are coming up in the summer in eastern German states in which the AfD is leading in polls. A few questions arise: How can schools educate children and young people to become democrats? How do you deal with an elected party that undermines democratic principles in the classroom? Where does freedom of expression in the classroom begin and where does it end?
“You not only have to want democracy, you also have to be able to do it,” Marina Weisband makes clear at the beginning of her book, “this form of government is the most strenuous one that you can ever imagine.” What then follows is a treatise about the experiences she had with democracy software in schools, garnished with excursions into psychology and philosophy, for example Hannah Arendt’s theory of political action.
She helped develop the Aula software
Marina Weisband has become known as an expert in digitalization. The trained psychologist was the political director of the Pirate Party and is now a member of the Green Party. Even among the more rowdy pirates, she was noticed as a good rhetorician. After the Russian attack, Weisband, who was born in Ukraine, became a regular on talk shows, where she calmly and intelligently explained the situation in her country of origin.
Since 2014, as you can read in her author profile at Fischer-Verlag, Weisband has been leading the Aula student participation project full-time. The acronym stands for “discuss and vote live”. At times, the almost 200 pages of her booklet seem like a kind of instruction manual for the software that she helped develop herself.
Weisband attests that the school system has a fundamental democratic problem: the rigid timetables, the prescribed content, the pressure of grades, the clear hierarchies. All of this promotes a “learned helplessness” among the students. The less they have a say, the less they develop the ability and motivation to change something. And are correspondingly more susceptible to extremism and populism.
The anarchy in school toilets is systematic
According to Weisband, evidence of this is the anarchy in school toilets. They are often the only place in the building where students feel unobserved. Because they certainly have the desire to change something, but are not given any constructive means, they have no choice but to express themselves in their own way: through riots and destruction.
One can consider this analysis to be exaggerated. It remains true that democracy must also be learned through co-determination. Weisband suggests the tool she developed, an online platform through which the entire student body can make decisions – for example about whether the school needs a prayer room, whether the canteen should offer a pizza day or whether trees should be planted in the school yard.
This also happens: Students vote for a ban on chewing gum
Even without purchasing the software straight away, you can draw a few conclusions from your experiences with it: you should trust students to make decisions, you should take their ideas seriously, discuss them with each other, find compromises and let them vote. Then young people surprised people, Weisband had this experience, sometimes with decisions that one would not have expected.
At one school, for example, after an extensive discussion, the student body did not vote for a chewing gum machine, but instead reaffirmed the current ban on chewing gum. So that the tables and chairs stay clean. At another school, after a long struggle, the students decided against a class hamster because of a classmate’s allergy to animal hair – and on top of that they learned what minority protection means. If only it were always that easy.
Weisband’s book doesn’t really provide any new perspectives; it’s more of a very clear plea for letting students have a say. For a digitalization expert, the author ends her text surprisingly analogously; she promotes volunteering, local associations and writing letters to members of parliament. Just democratic basics. But in these times it can’t hurt to repeat them.