Inspired by the documentary: Herr Bachmann und seine Klasse (Mr. Bachmann and his class)
As of the Friday family tradition, we usually choose one movie to spend a peaceful night. This time, we found this documentary- Mr. Bachmann and his class, which lasts for over 3 hours. Unexpectedly, this plain narration and faithful record perspective strongly hit our memory about school education.
The documentary is In Stadtallendorf, a small German city with a complex history of both excluding and integrating foreigners, immigrants account for 75% of the total population then.
The students in the class are mostly from immigrant families such as Turkey, Bulgaria, Russia, Israel, Morocco. Their parents come to Germany due to hard to find jobs in their hometown. Even Though they have double nationality, the identity and sense of belongings are still a big puzzle, mixing with a complicated religious background. Compared with normal students, they are a special group tagged “Strangers”, with a more sensitive and complex mind.
Genial teacher Dieter Bachmann offers his pupils the key to at least feeling as if they are at home. Mr. Bachmann patiently guides students to speak out about their difficulties, share their inner pain instead of avoiding this kind of sensitive topic. Communication and empathy are important lessons he teaches the students. Besides these, they also discuss some real-life topics, for example, the fairness about helping others, the division of labor between men and women, or even sex and homosexuality. Mr. Bachmann always raises the questions and keeps asking why, instead of imposing his views on students. The real world is diverse, and the answers to the questions are not necessarily black or white. The value of the problem lies in what is behind the problem, not the problem itself.
After finishing the sixth class, students are faced with an important turning point- entering into Gymnasium, Relschule, or Hauptschule. The reality is only the Gymnasium, Relschule can enter University. I am so touched by the last scenario when Mr. Bachmann distributes the Score sheet to students.
He said: “These scores are nothing but snapshots, this isn’t really you. You are all compelelty different people. These grades doesn’t reflect who you are at all. They are only snapshots of kind of unimportant things like Math and English. What’s much more important is that you’re all terrific kids and youngsters. You’re all really honest. Remain ture to yourselves. It is not so important whehter good or bad.”
subtitle source: https://www.bilibili.com/video/BV1kw411R714/
What a wonderful comment and encouragement! It reminds me of my elementary school- one of the most terrible moments is a teacher stands on the podium and sends out grades from lowest to highest. I was so nervous to hear my name earlier, because it means a bad score and will get parents to blame afterward. At the age of us, the score seems to be the only top priority in our life. I cannot remember why I need to study besides meet parents’ expectations and peer competition. Our value is simply defined by good or bad through the scores. If luckily, we could meet one teacher like Mr. Bachmann, it would be a lighthouse that guides us to understand the meaning of study and pursue the true value under the scores.
At this moment, I seem to have found the reason to explain my confusion during the youth period. The long and difficult self-exploration was lasts until the University. Without a clear score target and pressure to enter the next level study, it likes the stream lost its source. Then, we start back to ask ourselves some root questions such as ” why we need to learn? what kind of person do you want to be? how is the life you wish?”. We delayed answering ourselves that should have been found during our school education period.
How about Michi? My husband grew up locally in Munich as a “münchner kindl”, together with one 5 years older sister in the traditional German Education System. It gave me a different aspect by answering the below questions.
- Are there students from immigrant families in your class? How were their behaviors? – In my elementary school, there are some kids from Turkey families. Most of the girls are quite nice and study good, however some boys are bad. The worest case was school bullying and some oldder boys even insult teachers. Just like the kids in the movie, they lost indentity of nationality and lost themsleves.
- Did your parents push you to enter good school or target top universities? – Actually, due to bad study scores, I was almost ‘given up’ by my partents in the last years of elementary school. My mum even didn’t expect me to enter high school. But support by my uncle (one computer engineering who still open to learn new things in the age of 70s), I self awared the importance of continune study and request for repeat some subjects. It was hard time, but I made it through addtional test and entered into high school in the end.
- What are the differences between school education and university time?– The university time is much easier for me compared with school education. Insead of fixed subjects and boring memory stuff in school, I could be more free to choose my interested area and make additonal efforts.
All Roads Lead to Rome.
– by Alain de Lille, a French theologian and poet, whose Liber Parabolarum renders it as ‘mille viae ducunt homines per saecula Romam’ (a thousand roads lead men forever to Rome).
Another view from one of our friends- Armin, he is now pursuing a Ph.D. at Berkeley University after getting his master’s degree in Cambridge University. I had a short exchange with him regarding the meaning of education. He was quite disappointed about the learning in high school, even quoted one joke from his father- what you learned is what you will not use afterward.
Luckily, he was greatly inspired by one physical teacher when he was in the last year of high school. This triggered his passion to discover the physical world. Furthermore, the education at University gave him a good foundation to be a researcher in the future.
Whatever education system we were in, the most important thing for us is to find our own identity and intrinsic motivation. Someone gets to know themself at an early age, someone takes a longer time.
In the end, I would like to quote some advice for school students from Elon Musk.
- Try to be useful, do things that are useful to your fellow human beings and to the world.
- Try to have a positive net contribution to society. Ask yourself: Are you contributing more than you consume?
- Try to use the mental tools of physics and apply them broadly in life.
- Try to talk to people from different works of life, different industries, professions nd skills.
- Try to ingest as much information as you can, try to learn a little about a lot of things: read a lot of books to develop good general knowledge, peripheral exploration broadly of the knowledge landscape.
- Try to find overlaps of your talents and what you are interested in.
Hopefully, We could find the meaning of life sooner or later.