Saturday evening. A living room somewhere in North Rhine-Westphalia. I sit on the couch of my friend Sarah, we sip our champagne. We do not go to a bar, we continue to have little interest in Delta, Omikron and other variants.
Suddenly: Enter Johannes, 12, Sarah’s son. With arms raised in jubilation, the child appears on the scene. And says only two words, followed by an audible 20 exclamation marks: "Red Warnapp. "
Two words that would have put 20 question marks on our faces two years ago. Now, in January 2022, they put a smile on Sarah’s face. There is relief: Johannes will not go to school on Monday. Everyone, including me, is very happy about this.
Television journalist Nicole Diekmann is known as a serious political reporter. She is quite different, namely quick-witted and funny, on Twitter – where she already has tens of thousands of fans. In her column on t-online, she fillets political and social upsets about the Internet. Your new book "The Shitstorm Republic Is now available everywhere.
No, nobody in this scene is lazy or uneducated. Johannes is a straight-A student. Both parents are academics. And both are incredibly angry. So angry that it exhausts them in the meantime. For both want to protect their child from Corona. They do that, he himself too: He is fully vaccinated, wears FFP2 masks obediently and follows all the rules.
Red warning app protects better than those responsible
A red warning app therefore does not scare him and his family for the time being. However, all efforts ("personal responsibility") and the desire to stay healthy – you can’t take it any other way – are actively fought against. From politics.
In NRW, attendance is compulsory. The arguments for having all children in the classroom are good. Everyone should get the same chance at education despite the pandemic. Or more precisely: the same chances as possible. We all know: They don’t even have it in normal times. The German school system relies on parents to iron out at home what doesn’t work at school.
Only sitting in school is not such a great idea. After the dismayingly inane back-and-forth on this issue, it’s back to mask duty. But not everywhere in the school building either. The "nationwide air filter" project has been lost where fiber optic cables should have been long ago, so that all schools (crazy idea: all citizens) can be connected to the Internet!) have wi-fi. So you make do. It is aired, it is frozen, it is hoped, it is infected. One becomes insane.
Sets the policy secretly on Durchseuchung with children?
A suspicion arises, and a very persistent one at that: Politics pursues the insane agenda called: "Then they just infect themselves"." The contagion of our children is simply accepted. It’s been happening for a long time.
The incidences in this age group are unbelievably high, and I have not yet seen a scientist (except perhaps on YouTube or Facebook) who would put his hand in the fire for the statement to be able to name all long-term consequences of a corona disease.
So what could be an alternative to face-to-face teaching?? Alternate teaching. Digital teaching. Theoretical. The only problem is that equal opportunities are even more difficult to achieve. Schools will virtually fail as soon as children and young people are no longer sitting there.
Digital teaching? Forget it. Sure, they exist: the schools with connection to (fast) Internet. With directors who are not yet desperate when filling out the documents for funding from the Rohrkrepierer called "digital pact". And which are thus equipped with terminals that students can take home with them. With teachers who have taken the initiative to learn how to teach digitally.
There are digitalized schools – but unfortunately very few of them
But: These schools are exceptions. The mixture of federalism, indifference and unclear distribution of tasks leads to the fact that somehow everyone is a little bit responsible. But no one has the power, the will and, above all, the overview to really change anything in a meaningful way on the whole. And that’s why nothing happens.
The digitization of the education sector is a question of money, a question of technical infrastructure – but above all a question of will, or in new German: the mindset. How indifferent the policy is despite all lip service, one saw just on Monday, there was namely once again Ministerprasidentenkonferenz. And at the subsequent press conference, the following people were not seen: Volker Wissing (FDP), responsible for digitization, Bettina Stark-Watzinger (FDP), responsible for education, Karin Prien (CDU), the chairwoman of the Conference of Education Ministers.
A generation is wantonly endangered and burned out
Also on Monday, Berlin suspended compulsory attendance until mid-February. On Twitter, someone wrote about the ensuing discussion that she didn’t understand who wanted what now and why: she had the impression that people who had previously been convinced of the need for alternating instruction were suddenly against it.
The fact that parents now don’t even know what to be for is easy to explain: They have the choice between the plague – sending their child to school and thus, as it were, seeing eye to eye into infection – and cholera – leaving their child at home and somehow trying to reconcile their own lives, including their jobs, with homeschooling. And besides, to risk that the child misses teaching material. And feels lonely.
Everyone is against plague, but against cholera too. Countless parents are now left alone with these two terrible options because politicians don’t care. Because she hates children.
- Hate on the net:Faeser’s threats come to nothing
- Measures against hate and agitation:I am appalled at the decision-makers
- Corona crisis:Be Felix, not Olaf
There is no other way to explain why it is wantonly endangering an entire generation in the dawning of pandemic year number three. Burned.
Johannes may vote for the first time in almost six years. I can hardly imagine that he forgets the last two years. Over the weekend he said: "I think they all suck."