New Culture Campus
New Culture Campus
Thinking school in entirely new dimensions
Where will tomorrow’s skilled people come from? Everyone who understands the world of New Work not merely as an experimental field, but as the reality of the future, must ask this question. The idea of the New Culture Campus describes an educational landscape that turns our understanding of school upside down.
In the major and important debates about New Work, one significant aspect is sometimes pushed into the background: the question of how preparation for it can begin as early and as holistically as possible. Until now, the youngest generation has hardly been included in the social upheaval currently underway with regard to a different world of work. It is the adults who are facing the transformation. They strive for agile organizations, flat hierarchies, more responsibility for the individual, and lifelong learning. Yet the necessary skills, technological knowledge, awareness of sustainability, and capacity for open cooperation are not given to school and university graduates as basic equipment. The idea of New Work therefore has to begin earlier – namely in education and in the values with which the following generations are to grow up.
The Campus of Longing
The idea of the New Culture Campus, born from philosopher and founder of the New Work movement Frithjof Bergmann, is a radical departure from today’s idea of school. In such an educational landscape, the process leads from daycare through primary school to university and the first steps of one’s own entrepreneurial activity. Instead of teaching and learning, the children’s and young people’s own experiences are at the center. They engage with art, technology, craft, and IT; they experience nature directly and develop a practical understanding of sustainability. „In the current classical school system, children are functionalized into performers chasing the best grades,“ explains Margret Rasfeld, whom Frithjof Bergmann brought on board for implementing the New Culture Campus project. „When people think of school, everyone is so stuck in old patterns that a revolution in education seems unthinkable. Instead, we work away at small improvements to the old system. That is why it is an important approach to first bring an idea like the New Culture Campus into the world so that it can be discussed.“ Margret Rasfeld, current managing director of the initiative „Schule im Aufbruch,“ has already gained experience as a school principal in setting transformative processes in motion. But New Culture Campus thinks beyond all the limits imposed by German school and curriculum obligations.
„Our New Culture Campus is still in the planning stage,“ explains Andy Mayer, friend and right hand of Frithjof Bergmann. „For the implementation of the project, we want to bundle the knowledge of several bright minds and use synergies from different directions.“ Another pioneer for the project is therefore Marcus Fink, managing director of the Kreisjugendring Münchner Land. He too criticizes the structures in which society and school move – faster, higher, further. He brings experience from extracurricular education and does not see the New Culture Campus as a distant utopia. „Since 2010, the Jugendbegegnungsstätte am Tower in Oberschleißheim has already been for youth work what the campus could become for education. A large site, workshops, proximity to nature, and technology. People interested in the idea can come to us and see how such a concept has already been implemented at least in parts. And if more and more people are convinced by the idea, realization can happen very quickly.“
The holistic education aimed for on the New Culture Campus equips learners with skills they will actually need in the world in which they will live. „Ninety-five percent of what children laboriously acquire in school today is forgotten,“ Margret Rasfeld makes clear. „We want to prepare them for a world of work that places the human being at the center, their potential, not the economy. With the new form of learning, they would have the chance to try things out and discover what suits them, what they burn for, what they want to carry into the world. They gain systems knowledge that opens up how everything is connected. And they learn meta-competencies, such as the ability to work in teams and the attitude that they are allowed to make mistakes.“ Marcus Fink adds: „It is no longer enough to memorize things in order to recall them in a world in which everything turns and changes every day.“
Transformation always begins with small steps. Similar approaches, though not with this degree of social radicality, have been pursued since 2017 by the learning center „Learnlife“ in Barcelona. Inspired by this approach, the campus „Life Hamburg“ is currently emerging. The project of mail-order heir Benjamin Otto aims to realize the vision of intergenerational learning.
For financing New Culture Campus sites, Margret Rasfeld can imagine a fund founded and maintained by companies, from which municipalities build such educational landscapes without any company being able to exert direct influence. However, it is not only funders who must be convinced by the revolutionary educational orientation for the new generation. There are the parents, whose advance trust such a school needs; the lawmakers, on whose approval such a far-reaching design depends; and the teachers, who will face entirely new challenges. „Of course, teacher training also has to change,“ explains Margret Rasfeld. „But we must not delay this too long. By 2030 we must have changed the world. The future does not wait for administration.“
INFO/LINKS
[custom-facebook-feed]
