The lack of formally qualified teachers in Berlin schools is legendary. Or let’s jump right in with a quote:
Last week, Berlin’s education senator announced that Berlin’s schools will be short nearly 1,000 teachers next school year. The new record tells the story of a decline. If last year people were still upset that almost half of all newly hired teachers were lateral hires, now there aren’t enough lateral hires to fill all the open positions either.
Thirty years of lack of organizational development have made the teaching profession unattractive, the article says. Despite relatively good pay and job security.
It is apparently no longer interesting enough for young people. You have enough alternatives at your disposal. Probably because of this, many student teachers drop out on their way to the state exam.
And once they make it to the school, more and more teachers are dropping out. For a variety of reasons. The article roughly traces these.
My considerations
Perhaps we now need to rethink the school system and give this tendency a positive connotation: The profession becomes
increasingly attractive […] to older people who have little choice – and increasingly unattractive to younger people who have plenty of choice.
Why, in a future world of constant professional disruption, do young teachers, of all people, have to model an old, lifelong professional ideal for children that may not fit tomorrow’s world at all?
And why should it not be positive that in a country with an average life expectancy of over 80 years, people in midlife and with professional experience discover the teaching profession for themselves in order to bring their experience into the schools?
If the dictates of the original academic education were now put on the back burner and instead the actual competence for a combination of subjects were placed in front, then nothing would stand in the way of a first reform of the school system, would it not?
Perhaps with this experience gained elsewhere, a faster adaptation of the digital culture would also increasingly find its way into the system? It could be an opportunity. You would only have to want to jump transformatively …
Article published on piqd on June 11, 2022 as a reference to the Berliner Zeitung article Queraussteiger: Warum ist der Lehrerberuf so unsexy geworden?
