There is a lack of teachers in Thuringia, and the need is great in some subjects. According to Minister of Education Holter, digital teaching could help. There is already experience with distance learning. But not everyone likes the proposal.
Erfurt (dpa/th) – According to Thuringia’s Education Minister Helmut Holter, digital teaching can help in the event of an acute shortage of teachers. “Yes, also from the point of view of the shortage of teachers, it is a contribution to enable specialist teaching,” said the left-wing politician of the German Press Agency in Erfurt. It is expressly not about replacing teachers or cutting teaching positions. “It’s about the introduction of modern forms of teaching.” In his opinion, analog and digital teaching should be part of everyday life in Thuringia schools.
The 967 schools in the Free State had their first large-scale experience with digital teaching during the corona pandemic. Some of the around 250,000 students were taught remotely for weeks – via video switching, a learning platform and also with worksheets and tasks for learning at home. However, the distance learning was sometimes heavily criticized.
Holter now brought a hybrid variant into play. It is conceivable, for example, that a subject teacher teaches physics in a school – and several classes are connected from schools where there may not be enough physics teachers. “But that would have to be clarified legally, and data protection issues also need to be considered,” said Holter.
In Thuringia, various proposals for changing the school law are currently being discussed. A draft by the parliamentary groups of the Left, SPD and Greens envisages creating a legal basis for distance learning.
The Thuringian CDU education politician Christian Tischner sees the project critically. The proposals from Red-Red-Green got the schools on the collar, he said. “They want to solve the teacher problem by legally legitimizing distance learning. That’s not our image of school,” said Tischner. You can use digital tools, “and of course you have to use them in school too. But that doesn’t replace teachers.”
The FDP education politician Franziska Baum said that Holter’s idea was “not a great educational leap”. A teacher in the stream does not necessarily have to be better than a YouTube video. She could best imagine such a model in vocational schools. Baum suggested opening schools to non-academics, at least temporarily, in order to get the teacher shortage under control. As an example, she cited specialist chemists who did not have a university degree but could teach chemistry.
