What does Education Mean Today?

Schools are educational institutions in which teaching and learning are central. The art of teaching is referred to as didactics. Didactics is a term that was already used in ancient Greece, but only gained popularity in the 17th century through Johann A. Comenius (1592-1670). At the time, Comenius wrote a book entitled Great Didactics, in which he aimed to teach everyone everything in its entirety. Religious affiliation, social background or gender played no role in this. What did play a role, however, was the declared goal associated with the Great Didactic. According to Comenius, man had been cast out of communion with God through the fall of man and had lost his order as a result. However, he could not only put himself back in order, but also the world around him, if he lived according to the laws that underlie everything that exists. The art of teaching is therefore aimed at the comprehensive communication of the world and its laws in order to return to communion with God through education.

In addition to the Great Didactics, Comenius also published a textbook called Orbis sensualium pictus (The visible world). It consists of texts and illustrations and was used in schools until the 19th century. While the multimedia textbook was certainly a novelty in Comenius' time, today it is digital media that is sometimes even seen as revolutionary. In 2020, the Digital School Transformation campaign was formed, an association consisting of 30 organizations. These include the German Teachers' Association, the German Informatics Society and the German Digital Economy Association. It calls for «an immediate joint digitalization offensive by the federal, state and local governments that goes beyond the measures taken to date». The demand is accompanied by the unspoken expectation that the increased use of digital media will increase the likelihood of good teaching. However, good teaching is not characterized by the modernity of the chosen medium, but comprises at least three competencies: pedagogical competence, media competence and delivery competence. Pedagogical competence requires the development and maintenance of a pedagogical relationship, a benevolent, caring and supportive environment. In such an atmosphere, potentials can emerge in the child over time, which are perceived and reflected by the teacher, so that the child can become aware of its own, initially unconscious possibilities and then work on developing them. Following the educationalist Dieter Baacke, media literacy is about focusing on four dimensions: Media science, meaning to have an understanding of media; media use, refering to using media in different contexts; media design, thus being able to express oneself with the help of media, for example being able to form oneself in the world; and media criticism, which means being able to make a well-founded judgment based on the analysis of advantages and disadvantages. The delivery competence ultimately aims to help the child's potential to unfold with the help of a suitable medium. Such a medium can be a musical instrument, the own body or voice, pencil and paper, paints, clay, wood and, in upper grades, a tablet and working with artificial intelligence.

Since the end of 2022, media attention has focused on the phenomenon of ChatGPT. Developed by OpenAI and co-financed by Microsoft, the chatbot offers numerous possibilities never before seen in this form. For example, students can use ChatGPT to obtain additional information on learning topics, to clarify questions and better understand concepts, to practise foreign languages and to improve their conversational skills. The highly sophisticated texts that the chatbot generates in the preferred style and tone are all unique, which means that they cannot be recognized by any plagiarism software. The reactions to ChatGPT have therefore been very varied. New York City and some Australian states initially ordered a ban at public educational institutions, while Italy had data protection concerns. However, we know from the history of education that a strict ban on newly emerging media makes little sense for the long term. When novels came into fashion at the end of the 18th century, there were warnings about reading addiction, hysteria in girls and women and effeminacy in boys and men. With the advent of film around a hundred years later, it was said that films encouraged aggressive behavior, led to a decline in morals and manners and led young people into an illusory world. However, the bans of the past did nothing to protect young people from the supposedly negative consequences of the media, so education ultimately always had to deal with the new media. It will probably be no different with ChatGPT.

ChatGPT offers the opportunity to revisit the question of an educational concept of achievement. As the educationalist Wolfgang Klafki (1927-2016) emphasized, education aims to empower self-determination, co-determination and solidarity. The necessary school performance assessment must be realigned accordingly. It is not only the result, in other words the output, that is decisive, but also the path that led to this result. What development path did the individual students take, what role did communication and critical thinking play during the learning process? Klafki's plea for a pedagogical concept of achievement understands learning as a living process and not as a functionalist procedure to be optimized. Waldorf education offers an interesting methodological approach to this, which Rudolf Steiner pointed out to the staff of the first Waldorf school in Stuttgart in 1919. The curriculum must be taught in such a way that it connects to the lives of the students, which means nothing other than that what is to be learned should not only be perceived, but also empathized with and felt. This is not just about cognitive understanding, but also explicitly about being touched, that is, about the emotional dimension. The possibility of touching someone in this way in turn requires a relationship and, as it were, a corresponding educational atmosphere. In a second step, it is important to reflect together from different perspectives on what did not remain on the outside, but what was emotionally touching and perhaps even got under the skin. The exchange moderated by the teacher, as well as the content analysis, are the focus here. The third step then aims to form a lively concept of the subject matter based on the previous joint work.

The seductiveness of ChatGPT is particularly evident where teaching remains functionalist. If, on the other hand, it is filled with life in the way outlined above, artificial intelligence is not a threat, but rather an opportunity that can ideally even stimulate educational processes, especially in upper classes.