Mathias Greffrath

The climate is tilting, species are dying, waves of migration are throwing the world into turmoil, technology is revolutionizing our working lives, the rise of platform monopolists is degrading democracies to a facade, irrationalism is on the rise, the public sphere has collapsed into bubbles, the educational canon is crumbling – in short, we are in the midst of an upheaval that is touching all areas of life, putting habits to the test, overturning old expectations.

Epochal ruptures go hand in hand with revolutions in knowledge systems, forms of learning, and worlds of thought. Thus, the European modern era began with an educational revolution. Ideas for restructuring curricula, schools, forms of learning.
But where are the ideas for the pedagogy of the Anthropocene? There is little debate about the dramatic nature of our situation, but why is there no great debate about the school of the future? Where is the outcry of the parents, the outcry of the teachers, the outcry of the students?

Mathias Greffrath, born in Bad Harzburg in 1945, is a German sociologist, writer and journalist. He writes for Die Zeit, the Süddeutsche Zeitung, and GEO, and is also a member of the scientific advisory board of Attac and the PEN Center Germany.