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We educated citizens with a fear of heights

2020-09-27T17:59:38.581Z


Intellectual and entrepreneur at the same time? This is mutually exclusive in Germany. We don't take chances - out of sheer fear that we might miss out.


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Adventurer: think education and daring together

Photo: John M Lund Photography Inc / Getty Images

Every great innovation in human history has been condemned.

In Plato's "Phaedrus" it is said that writing is dangerous because in the case of printed texts it is not possible to inquire who does not understand something.

Help, the writing is not interactive, anyone who reads becomes stupid!

In the 18th century, when books became cheap mass-produced goods and had high print runs, people feared the "reading mania".

Help, suddenly everyone is reading romance novels, the civil order is going under!

Comics followed in the dance of horrors in the 20th century, then social media in the 21st - and every time the world supposedly came to an end.

All nonsense.

Goethe works without paper just like streaming without celluloid.

It doesn't matter how Ovid and Shakespeare are read, whether it's 1920 on Reclam crumbled paper or 2020 on a Kindle display;

and if you don't want to read yourself, Siri will read you.

In other words: It depends on the content, not on the container.

To the author

Photo: 

Oliver Betke

Andreas Barthelmess

, born in 1979, is an economist, startup entrepreneur and founder of Think Tank 30 Germany (Club of Rome).

As a publicist he has written for "Zeit", "FAZ", "Handelsblatt", "NZZ", SPIEGEL, "taz", "Welt" and "Wirtschaftswoche".

His book "The Great Destruction" has just been published by Dudenverlag.

Conversely, technology does not threaten culture, it creates culture.

Where new technologies come into the world, culture and trade arise, as history shows.

With writing, cities and states establish themselves, with book printing people emancipate themselves from the feudal authorities, with overseas cables modern globalization begins, with social media democratic movements like #MeToo, #FridaysForFuture and #BlackLifesMatter emerge.

Old standards, on the other hand, hinder progress.

In the Corona semester, a number of professors refused to teach digitally.

Zoom consultation hour?

No result, if necessary you have data protection concerns.

Corona as a protective claim: The German university is at the top in this discipline.

One can understand the refusal to zoom in the case of almost retirees who have learned to write on slates.

But the digital youth also hang on to old pigtails.

Germany's young educated elite are extremely conservative in their code and character.

The boys catch the shirt worn out of their pants in a libertarian way with welted shoes.

The girls wear long hair uniformly, pearls always go.

A few very daring go to Google

Graduates differentiate themselves through the daring of their sneakers, in the end they all go the same silver bullet.

Just praised for the harmony of "Jugend musiziert", sport rowing in Oxbridge and an internship at the UN, they are now faced with the risk-free decision: McKinsey or the cultural foundation, a few very daring go to Google.

At the end of the race, the peloton of the highly gifted is part of the A14 salary.

The daring gives way to the pet, one lives quite well.

We Germans are a people of civil servants and persevering.

Those who have parents with academic status and social security don't want anything else for themselves.

The height of fall that we have reached through birth or training makes us afraid of falling.

We don't take the chance because we are afraid of missing out.

We are educated citizens with a fear of heights.

And while the researched high potentials sit like trembling kittens in the trees, canon-free business graduates are founding third-rate startups.

Our problem in Germany is: We confuse quality with tradition, and we cling to tradition out of lethargy and habitual insecurity.

This is the educational dustiness and pet-like nature of our intellectual talents: With children's choir, bookshelf and Labrador, you've never done anything wrong, so we're sticking to it.

Every now and then the insignia of establishedness get an update, then we put an electric car in front of the house.

But whoever thinks this way is an Oedipussi who cannot get away from his parents.

Anyone who thinks this way does not make his education free by opening up a world full of possibilities.

Anyone who thinks this way will never set free undirected creative forces.

What the Americans have ahead of us

We can learn that too from Silicon Valley.

At Stanford and Berkeley, mathematicians, economists and engineers discuss Homer and Ovid in their "Humanities" courses.

The philologists get to know the makers - and in the end become one themselves.

What Americans have ahead of us is the ease with which they associate education and risk-taking adventurism.

Indiana Jones is a professor - and at the same time the opposite of the German professor.

The American perspective on entrepreneurship is similar.

For us Germans this is a primitive category, in the best case the possibility of compensating for an educational failure economically.

Thomas Mann showed this by drawing the reverse conclusion: When the businessman Thomas Buddenbrook becomes an intellectual, his company goes bankrupt.

In Germany you can only be an intellectual 

or an 

entrepreneur, not both at the same time.

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Andreas Barthelmess

The Great Destruction - What the digital break is doing to our lives

Publisher: Duden

Pages: 256

Publisher: Duden

Pages: 256

Buy for € 18.00

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Sure: this is a mistake that we have to leave behind.

"Founding a startup" is not a business administration category, but a good idea to work on the world spirit.

The two philosophers Peter Thiel, a chess grandmaster, and Alex Karp, an Adorno connoisseur who did his doctorate in Frankfurt, demonstrated this with the controversial big data company Palantir.

The double-digit billion-valued company is about to go public.

Let us remember: From the Renaissance to the 18th century, the ideal of the "whole person" was valid.

Leonardo da Vinci designed machines and city fortifications, Goethe was a professional politician.

Education does not oblige us to sit in front of our parents' wall cupboards rustling paper.

Let's learn from the Americans.

Today education does not call for Biedermeier, but for Boldness.

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Source: spiegel

All life articles on 2020-09-27

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