Farewell to the Innocent Bystander – Education Is Not a One-Way Street

We have to prepare our children for life.

It is one of those statements that, at first, seem almost impossible to disagree with. Children have to learn to take responsibility, to be considerate of others, to endure conflict, to cope with disappointment and to make their own decisions. We want to raise them to become independent human beings who can find their place in society.

That sounds reasonable.

But at some point, we have to reverse the perspective.

If we want to shape our children so that they can become valuable members of society, shouldn’t we be at least as determined to shape society so that it can be of value to our children?

Once we ask that question, it is no longer only the child who is under scrutiny, the child who is supposed to be prepared for the world as it is. The world as it is comes under scrutiny as well.

And that does not concern parents and educators alone. It concerns all of us.

In his song “Wann”, Rio Reiser sings about someone who does not really want to change the world at all. There is only one problem: that is impossible.

We change the world anyway. Through what we do and what we leave undone; through what we buy, say, support, tolerate or reject. With every person we meet, we change at least a tiny part of this world – while at the same time being changed by that encounter ourselves.

Even staying out of things does not stop anything.

Many years later, Dritte Wahl looked at the same idea from another angle in “So wie ihr seid”. Someone who believes they cannot be manipulated because they stay out of everything may end up precisely where those who benefit from the existing order would like them to be: on the sidelines, silent and without influence.

That removes one particularly comfortable position: that of the innocent bystander.

This does not mean that everyone has to get up in the morning and organise the world revolution before breakfast. Far too many people have already set out to save the world and caused considerable damage along the way.

The smaller question is the more important one:

Which side am I on?

I do not need to have a solution to every problem. I do not need to be morally perfect. I do not even need to win.

But I can ask myself what I am doing where I actually have the power to do something.

We can suffer change – or we can help shape it.

And once we decide to shape it, sooner or later the question is no longer merely what we want to change, but how we want to change it.

Rio Reiser’s question includes these words:

How, if not with love?

Love, of all things.

Right in the middle of a political song.

And yet it is not so surprising there at all.

“Love your neighbour as yourself” is one of the old principles of the Jewish and Christian traditions; Jesus takes it up in the New Testament and places it at the heart of his teaching. You do not have to be a Christian believer to notice that this short sentence contains two people.

My neighbour.

And me.

Strangely enough, it is often the first half that receives most of the attention. Love your neighbour. Help others. Be considerate. Care.

But it does not say: Love your neighbour and forget yourself.

It says: as yourself.

The other person has a value that I am called upon to respect. But I am a person too. My dignity, my needs and my boundaries do not disappear simply because other people matter to me.

Love for others without any love for oneself can become self-erasure. Self-love without concern for others can become selfishness. Humanity begins when we understand that we do not have to choose between the two.

And this also makes the connection to politics clearer. Love as an attitude does not mean finding everyone likeable. Nor does it mean avoiding conflict or refraining from disagreement. It begins much more modestly: by refusing to regard a human being – myself included – merely as a means to an end.

A political goal, too, loses its meaning when the people whose freedom it supposedly seeks become nothing more than instruments along the way.

This is where the thought touches on Rosa Luxemburg, without any need to turn Luxemburg into a Christian thinker. Her understanding of freedom in particular resists the idea that people merely have to be brought into line for the supposedly correct cause. A liberation in which someone ultimately decides who possesses the correct kind of freedom and who is expected to keep quiet already contains its own contradiction.

From there, it is not far to the idea of radical self-love sung about by Slime.

The phrase sounds different when Tex Brasket sings it. Someone who knows exclusion, homelessness and life on the margins of society not merely from books and statistics brings another kind of knowledge to the subject. Experience does not automatically make anyone wise or infallible. But experience is knowledge too.

We can study poverty. We can measure homelessness statistically and analyse social exclusion academically. All of that matters.

And yet it is something entirely different to wake up in the morning without knowing where you will sleep that night.

When life has repeatedly told you that you are worth nothing, the statement “I have value” takes on a political dimension.

Then self-love is not a wellness programme.

Then it can become resistance.

But this is precisely where self-love must not turn into self-certainty. Holding the right political conviction does not automatically make its holder the right kind of person. We can campaign for justice and behave unjustly. We can demand freedom while leaving no room for others. We can fight oppression and become authoritarian ourselves in the process.

Anyone who is so certain of being on the right side that they no longer need to question themselves should be suspicious of that very certainty.

Because when politics is about people, people must remain visible even in pursuit of a supposedly good cause.

And that brings us back to the children.

We say that we have to prepare them for life. Of course we do. Children have to learn that not every wish will be fulfilled, that actions have consequences and that other people have needs and rights too.

But what kind of life are we preparing them for?

In “Kinder”, Illegal 2001 describe an adult world that has already answered that question on the child’s behalf:

Barely born, already planned.

Children’s wishes become expectations. Possibilities become predetermined paths through life. The curious question “What would you like to be when you grow up?” turns remarkably quickly into the adult question: “What should you become so that something sensible comes of you?”

And “sensible” quite often means economically sensible.

Children possess something that adults can easily lose over the years. They are not yet familiar with many of the things we take for granted. That is why they can ask questions about things whose justification we have long since forgotten.

Why do we do it this way?

Because that is simply how it is done.

Why?

Because we have always done it this way.

That is not a particularly convincing answer.

Children have to learn.

But adults can learn from children.

We should therefore do more than explain to them how the world works. We should also listen when they ask why it works the way it does.

We can teach children solidarity while allowing them to experience a world in which competition is rewarded. We can tell them that every human being has equal dignity while they watch people being treated very differently according to income, origin or ability. We can teach them about democracy and then ignore their own objections as soon as those objections become inconvenient.

And afterwards, we wonder what they have learned.

Education cannot be a one-way street.

We do not pass the world on to other people merely so that they can continue our work. We pass it on to people who have the right to judge what we have done, to preserve it, to change it and, where necessary, to discard it.

If they eventually discover that we made a complete mess of something somewhere along the way, it would be rather ridiculous for us to take offence.

After all, we once wanted to be the generation that would do better too.

Tradition can be valuable. It preserves experience, knowledge, stories and sometimes even a sense of home. But a tradition does not deserve to survive merely because it is old. Continuing something we have recognised as nonsense simply for the sake of continuity and tradition is not the preservation of culture.

It is the inheritance of an error.

A valuable legacy can consist in precisely this:

Not a finished society that our children are expected to take over without complaint, but one they are allowed to change.

That little word “allowed” matters.

Not: You must finish what we failed to accomplish.

Not: You must realise our vision.

But first of all:

You are allowed to examine what we leave behind.

You are allowed to reach different conclusions.

You are allowed to do things differently.

And this is usually the point at which somebody comes along and says:

Life is no pony farm.

That German expression can be a harmless observation. Of course life does not arrange itself according to all our wishes. People fail, lose, become ill, make bad decisions, are abandoned and lose people they love. No society can protect us from all of that.

But the missing pony farm is invoked remarkably often whenever someone asks whether an avoidable problem really has to be unavoidable.

Then “Life is no pony farm” suddenly means something else:

Just put up with it.

And that is exactly where I disagree.

Life is no pony picnic.

That phrase does not really exist in English – which is precisely why it works here. It mixes the German “pony farm” with the English idea that something difficult is “no picnic”. Sometimes it is worth playing with these pieces of received wisdom, because taking them apart helps us notice what they are actually claiming.

The fact that not all suffering can be prevented is no argument for accepting suffering that can be prevented.

The fact that life can be hard does not oblige us to make it harder for one another.

The fact that not every wish can be fulfilled does not mean that wishes, interests and needs are meaningless.

And if some people suddenly find it difficult to take account of needs they have previously been able to ignore with ease – well:

That is no picnic.

Life is not a request programme either.

True.

But sometimes it plays your song.

And above all, the fact that not every wish becomes reality is no sensible reason to stop wishing.

A humane society does not owe its children a pony farm. It does not owe them a world without disappointment, pain or failure. And it certainly does not owe them the fulfilment of every wish.

But neither should we tell them that every pile of manure is unavoidable fate.

We owe them something else: the opportunity to look for themselves and learn to distinguish. Between what is part of life and what has been made by people. Between what we have to accept and what we can change.

And the freedom to draw their own conclusions.

We will not finish society.

Neither will our children.

Nor do they have to.

Society is not a piece of work that one generation eventually completes and hands to the next with the words: There you are, finished – please don’t touch anything.

It is always unfinished.

And that is precisely where its hope lies.

We do not have to make people fit a finished world. We can strengthen people in their ability to shape their world – while at the same time working to leave behind a world in which they can remain fully human.

The world after us will be different.

That is not ours to decide.

What we can decide is whether we merely suffer change or take part in shaping it.

And we should grant our children the same right.

Not the duty to save our world.

The right to make their own from it.

And so the questions remain: why wait, why elsewhere, why without love – and why leave it to someone else?

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