Dr. Juergen Zimmer
Director of the Learning Village
Professor emeritus Dr. Juergen Zimmer, Director of the Learning Village, is a transcontinentally experienced and respected innovator in education. His concept is characterized by UNESCO as a “new standard of educational excellence for the world community of the 21st century” and “world-class innovative effort in the field of education”.
The Development Forum of the United Nations has published a report on his concept with the title “Life-situation approach makes more sense” (Vol. XVI, No.6). The paper reports on kindergartens and schools in Europe, Asian and Latin American countries which work with this approach. In this report we find: “Probably the greatest difference between academic schools and his kindergartens and schools is that the first is an institution and the second a dynamic process. The gathering together of concerned groups, learning about experience, finding resources, the participation of parents, students and community at all stages, identifying life-situations and turning them into curriculum-elements, dealing with the situations, recording and evaluating the work undertaken, planning further projects, the growing solidarity of the community as people find they can act effectively together – all these are part of the learning process. One cannot overestimate the importance of this pilot work. These kindergartens and schools have shown that education can encourage creativity, self-reliance and constructive community action – that through an imaginative and practical combination of life-situations and fact-based learning. The three R’s can be taught without drilling, stress or overtaxing the students. This is only the beginning.”
In Germany he was directing the nationwide reform of kindergartens. Numerous countries in Asia, Africa, Europe, North and South America requested his consultancy and cooperation. His focus is early childhood education, schooling, intercultural and international education, community education and development, and entrepreneurship education.
He is a Professor emeritus for Educational Science at the Free University of Berlin. There he founded the International Academy for Innovative Education, Psychology and Economy. In Thailand he is the co-founder and president of the School for Life in Chiang Mai and the executive director of the Beluga School for Life in Phan Nga, and the director for international affairs of the Rural and Social Management Institute in Bangkok. He was member of the German UNESCO Commission and acts now as Conseiller Cultural of the African Diplomatic Academy in Paris/France.
One of his masterpieces is the development of United Schools for Life, of “Open Learning Villages” (UNESCO) with an unique combination of excellent schooling and entrepreneurial centers of excellence.
Interview with Jurgen Zimmer
As a German refugee child, he experienced hunting scenes in the Allgau and on Lake Constance, where he went to elementary school in the moated castle. Later, he grew up in boarding schools – in the Hermann Lietz school and in Salem. With a scholarship from the Academic Foundation for the German People1, he studied psychology and pedagogy in Hamburg, Freiburg and Munich. He has worked with such institutions as the Max-Planck-Institute for Educational Research in Berlin, the German Youth Institute in Munich, universities in Tubingen, Munster, Berlin and São Paulo. He has worked in countries in Latin America, Africa and Asia, including Argentina, Brazil, Uruguay, Chile, Costa Rica, Nicaragua, Columbia, Mexico, Trinidad, Ghana, Nigeria, Kenya, China, Hong Kong, South Korea, Japan, Indonesia, Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand and the Philippines.
He influenced the kindergarten reform in West Germany in the 1970’s, and accompanied the kindergarten reform in former-East Germany in the 1990’s. He founded the Institute for Intercultural Education and committed himself to developing intercultural community schools. He was one of the founders of the educational journal “betrifft:erziehung”, managed the educational resort “Die Zeit” (“The Time”) and is one of the publishers of the educational journal “Neue Sammlung” (“New Collection”). He has often taken students with him to the periphery of this world and confronted them with earnest situations. He has worked for UNESCO, the UN, OECD, GTZ2, and the German Education Council, and was vice-president and president of the International Community Education Association (ICEA) for two decades.
And today? He coaches a model of culture-sensitive tourism in Thailand – Joy’s House in Chiang Mai – and combines it with a second model, the “School for Life”, an entrepreneurial, “de-schooled” community school for AIDS orphans and children of poverty. He intends to retire in April 2004.
Where is your home?
If I could perform magic and could replicate myself, I would like to live in Berlin, on Lake Constance, on the island of Bali and on a small farm in northern Thailand where the “School for Life” is located, all at the same time. And maybe in Salvador Bahia as well, a city with a highly intense African-Brazilian culture.
When you began working in developing countries in the late 1970’s, were you fleeing from restoration or the difficult end to the West German kindergarten reform?
No, not at all. We learned a lot from Paulo Freire, the Brazilian pedagogue and author of “Pedaogogy of the Suppressed”, in this reform, which concerned the Situation Approach and its dissemination in nine German states. We spoke of key situations, he of generative topics. He did not want to simply accept the world as it is, which was also not our intent. He wanted to make living conditions more humane. Somehow, the news of our work reached Latin America. The first people who invited me to Latin America in 1979 were the Nicaraguan Sandinistas, who had just marched victoriously into Managua. They considered me a type of mine detector who helped them trace their educational-political problems left behind by the dictator Somoza, whom they had forced from the country. More than a rudimentary educational system did not exist. I worked as an independent expert for the German GTZ and the BMZ3 with our partners in Nicaragua on creating regional-specific educational systems, primarily developing the curricula: The generative topics the Miskito Indians on the Atlantic coast face are very different than the topics faced by the campesinos on the Pacific side of the country. These topics also changed over time. The more active the Contra and the tighter the economic embargo became, the more the topics were characterized by need. They usually began with “falta de…”, “we lack…” – energy, medication, replacement parts, food… Is it possible to give school subjects titles like, “Lack of medications, and what to do about it”? It is.
What can you do in a classroom to combat the need for medication or replacement parts?
Nothing: The answer is: Get out of the classrooms. Nicaraguan pupils came up with lots of clever inventions: They saw to it that the contrast fluid in the x-ray machine in the general hospital in Managua did not have to be reordered from Sweden after 30 x-rays for a lot of money, and instead, that it could be treated and made reusable. They transformed the heat that air-conditioners give off into a refrigerator-like coolness. They tried to build solar ovens and learned to plant their own pharmacy. They contributed to a reduction in Dengue fever by drying out spots where mosquitoes lay their eggs – small water holes, for example. 95,000 secondary students and university students taught 500,000 Nicaraguans who were unable to read or write to read within half a year. The people who created PISA4 were more modest. They were happy when the pupils were able to solve life-related questions. But in Nicaragua, the pupils faced real problems.
Is it better to have a freedom movement and then a real education reform?
No. Whether in West Germany after 1945 or in Nicaragua in 1979, education reforms do not run on their own. Shaul B. Robinsohn already pointed this out in the late 1960’s with his often-quoted article “Two decades of non-reform in West German education”. The GDR’s practice with the Einheitsschule5 and a dynamic talent theory looked like pieces of Swiss cheese after special schools were introduced. Most people around the world are convinced that a school is only a school if it has classrooms, if the children sit in rows, and if the teacher stands in front of the classroom like a lion tamer. They believe in a museum that was founded in the 18th and 19th centuries.
Some of the Nicaraguan revolutionaries also believed in this. They considered it scientific and just to have stark classrooms with writing desks, closely-knit subject-fixated curricula throughout the country, where the school inspector knew what all of the fourth graders in the country would learn in the third hour on 19 October. The other Nicaraguan education planners, the “de-schoolers”, who considered learning theory-accompanied active participation in developing the community, considered the others “quadraticos”, blockheads.
Were there winners, or only losers in the fight over the right way to learn?
In 1986, a real fight arose in the Ministerio de Educación. Two fractions – by the way, most of them were young, in their mid-20’s – threatened to block each other’s ideas and reforms. They invited me to moderate the disagreement. We, 60 people, relocated to the abandoned villa formerly belonging to one of Somoza’s lovers on a mountain for two weeks and discussed the question as to whether a curriculum must be rigidly structured around school subjects, or if it could be oriented on generative topics in the area, the region and the country. By the way, I was scared stiff of this event, more than for any other event in my career. At the end, all of us were winners, and we closed with a huge party.
How?
The idea that inter-disciplinary knowledge could be „plundered“ and be directly applied to key situations and problems – without a detour into school subjects and without a didactic filter – became popular. And that additional first-hand knowledge is needed from people who have already dealt with such problems. And – Paulo Freire sends his greetings – that teachers can become pupils and pupils become teachers, and that reflection and action belong together.
The Sandinistas, crushed by the economic embargo, the Contras and home-made problems, were voted out of office in the early 1990’s…
…that’s right. But still, the Sandinistas are the only freedom movement that I know of that made real elections possible a dozen years after their victory.
And you?
I worked with Paulo Freire and his team. And with teachers in the new German states. And with very poor pedagogues in Africa and Asia.
Let’s travel around the globe with our fingers and point out a few spots. Brazil, for example.
The Movimento Negro Unificado, the African-Brazilian movement in Brazil, pursued the question as to whether a “black” education concept could be developed: A hundred years after the abolishment of slavery, the majority of blacks still live under very poor conditions. When I held a seminar on African-Brazilian generative topics with representatives from the movimento in Rio de Janeiro, they listed “the recreation of self-worth”, the “de-colonilisation of the body” and the “de-colonisation of the culture” as their highest priorities. I was surprised. I had expected topics relating more directly to their immediate existence.
Other partners included the Guarani Indians on a reserve near São Paulo. They felt threatened by armed land speculators and wanted to start a school of cultural resistance. The idea was to reconstruct traditional Indian knowledge, combine it with modern knowledge, and invite national and international guests to an academy as a sort of publicity-generating protective shield. Just as we had started construction and received funds and publicity assistance from a friendly Swiss foundation, something unexpected happened.
The land speculators?
No, Brazil’s largest television station came and filmed a 42-part soap opera about the love between the chief’s beautiful daughter and a Brazilian young man from outside the reservation. Half of Brazil saw the soap, and instead of opening the school of resistance, the Guarani only had to charge admission and provide for the guests who wanted to tour the film location.
Hermann Glaser (Nuremberg’s former Culture Department head) and I invited over 100 Brazilians to different German cities – folk musicians, folk medicine men, artists of various styles from the urban favela and poor regions of the Sertão. When we started this, Glaser said, “If we fail, then we should fail at as high a level as possible.” I’ve kept his sentence in mind since. The Guarani story ended on an interesting mid-level. But still, the land speculators no longer risked driving the Indians from their reservation.
…Ghana and Nigeria…
Our emphasis in Ghana was to develop pre-school education without cramming eighty children into a small hut and writing “kindergarten” above the door while real life continues outside. The pedagogical ideas regarding key situations were unusual. “Lost in the bush?” The response: The children learn a range of different shrill screams, everything from “Hello, Mama and Papa, I’m over here,” to – very shrill – “The snake is about to bite!” Women from different provinces were involved in this work and shared their experiences. We discovered a special taboo: The women from one of the regions did not eat chicken meat. The women from another region who ate chicken asked who told them not to eat chicken. Their husbands, they answered. Everyone laughed, and they discovered that the men had tricked the women so that they could eat the chicken themselves. The men probably got in trouble for that.
The province government in Badagry, Nigeria, asked me to examine a problem in some of their primary schools. Not only did the pupils skip school, the teachers did, as well. It was not difficult to discover why they stayed away. The teachers, poor as church mice, smuggled goods over the near-by border into Benin. The question became, how can a school be developed further that earns more income in or with the school than with smuggling? The key word is “entrepreneurship”, which means starting with nothing, developing and refining a good idea, and carrying it out with perseverance on the marketplace. Of course, this is not an easy answer.
You worked in other countries, including the Philippines, on creating such educational processes that enable poor children not only to learn, but also to earn money. A Sisyphus task?
Yes and no. I worked together with my colleague Guenter Faltin a lot, and we learned to understand the poor children as entrepreneurs. A “Productive Community School” was founded in Manila, on Smokey Mountain, the city’s smoking, cadaver-like, gigantic mountain of trash. An old man had told the children his secret of making burned-out neon lights light again.
Another school tried to sell organic rice to increasingly-informed customers. A third school arose in the form of the restaurant “Hapag Kalinga” on the edge of the red-light district Ermita. The school was founded out of a workshop on a public square with street children, child prostitutes, police, pimps, the priest from the nearest church, and a corrupt district mayor named Kojak. The workshop was financed, by the way, by the Goethe Institute and its former courageous director Uwe Schmelter. The street children had the terrific idea of starting an adventure restaurant – with a Canadian camp fire corner, a Korean Bulgogi grilling corner, or an Italian corner with a noodle machine where guests could make their own noodles. A restaurant was created with a changing regional kitchen – the Philippines is made up of 7,500 islands – and children who were highly motivated in their work.
Freedom movements come and go, education reforms come and go. And projects?
Yes, so do they, in Germany just like anywhere else. Previously-famous schools develop themselves into a shade of mouse-grey. Kindergartens with special profiles gradually loose their touch. Old things disappear, new things come. Only in a few cases has it been possible to persevere and remain at the peak of reform.
Things often happen differently than we plan in real-life learning. Nigel Barley, currently, as I recall, director of an important London cultural anthropology museum, was always very impressed by the brilliant reports his colleagues created about their field research. Then he went to Africa himself to study a remote tribe. Barley’s quintessence: The tribe used the opportunity to study a British ethnologist intensively for a year, while Barley spent the entire time caught in preparing his research work. But he wrote one of the funniest books – “Traumatic Tropics” – on the entire truth about ethnological field research ever written.
I met Winfried Muziol in Thailand a few weeks ago. His business card identifies him as a “Consultant – Small Enterprise Development”, and he worked for the GTZ in Africa for three decades. I asked him to summarize his work and whether he felt like Sisyphus at the end. His response: As long as he was there and money flowed into the projects, everything – besides malaria tropica, bilharziosis, corneitis and poisoned fish – was wonderful. But he did not believe that the Chamber of Commerce he founded with local partners in Niger survived more than a few months after he and the funds left. He had asked the GTZ repeatedly to not only evaluate the projects while they were running, but to also look at them five years afterwards. They avoided doing this with all their might, as even the GTZ is hesitant to saw through the branch they’re sitting on. Muziol and I spent Happy Hour discussing “sustainability” as a myth created by the international conference machinery, rejected this idea, and developed our own theory. The emphasis should be on the well-being of everyone who participates in a project here and now. The presence counts. Heaven on earth is related to this moment in time.
…China and Hong Kong…
That was my last trip with Hellmut Becker, the founder and director of the Max-Planck Institute for Educational Research in Berlin, and son of the former Prussian Minister of Culture Carl Heinrich Becker. Father Becker had led a delegation from the League of Nations during the Weimar Republic that, at China’s request, inspected the country to create recommendations for modernising their education system. We had a different task. We travelled at a time when the Beijing massacre had not yet taken place, but when the question of integrating Hong Kong into the country was appearing on the horizon. A Chinese delegation of education planners was to meet for a week with a delegation from Hong Kong to discuss integrating Hong Kong’s education system. Our role was to be one of honest brokers. Therefore, we travelled to China to study the education system there, then stayed in Hong Kong with the same goal, and moderated the meeting with the education representatives. The result was surprising: China’s representatives were more interested in developing their own system of education further in the direction of Hong Kong’s and less interested in how Hong Kong’s education system could be made subordinate to China’s ideas of 1997.
The world’s children are all children, right?
On the one hand, yes, and it is amazing how they are able to survive catastrophic conditions or adults’ convoluted attempts at education. On the other hand, poor children are more like Huckleberry Finn: They are wilder, stronger, more hurt, and harder. In the many workshops in which I asked educators and teachers which situations are of special importance to the children in their region and area, very different answers arose. They varied according to social-geographic and societal relations. The key situations a three-year-old rich child in Hong Kong faces – “My mama sends me to pre-school in the morning, to a tutor in the afternoon, and afterwards I have to do homework for an hour and a half” – is different than that of a poor child in Hong Kong: “Home alone” means, for the second child, being locked in a meagre apartment on the 17th floor for eight or ten hours a day – while its parents are at work – and learning how to deal with the dangers of fire and electricity, with hunger and loneliness.
The situation “fear of armed robbery” faced at one time by children on Nicaragua’s northern border is not very different than the situation “surviving shooting” faced by a child who has wandered between the fronts on the southern Philippine island of Mindanao, where the army and guerrillas still fight. I encountered an unusual variant of this situation on the smuggler and pirate island Jolo: “Surviving shooting” meant knowing what to do when the – let’s say – 30,000 residents raised their 90,000 rapid-fire weapons into the air at festivals. The lead that rained down often injured children’s heads.
What do you have planned for after your retirement? A secluded island under coconut trees?
Certainly not. But I was always a wanderer. My mother moved 28 times during her life, and I often moved with her. Working somewhere else for a time does not mean going away for me, especially when I consider this planet one world. I feel that I have a duty to work in areas where life is not as rosy as in the Federal Republic of Germany.
In the past twenty-five years, I was always content in other countries when I had work there. During the few stays that I spent as a tourist, I was discontented: I had to wait in hotel lobbies for tour guides who took me to over-run sights or businesses that cheated me. I left with a bad feeling every time because I hadn’t gotten to know the people in the country.
But it is also possible to experience a country in another way, not as a prisoner of the tourism industry. That’s why I coach a project in Thailand that has become known in the media: Joy’s House. A Thai family in Chiang Mai has opened its doors to people who are interested in the country’s culture and daily life on the far side of beaten tourist paths. About an hour from Joy’s House in the mountains is Joy’s Farm, located in the royal forrest. The village Pongkum is near the farm, a village in which we found 28 children whose parents have died of AIDS or who live in other difficult circumstances. Guests from Joy’s House and I considered what could be done for these children. The result: The School for Life has begun. My mother died of leukaemia in 1999 at the age of 86; a solidarity concert she had prepared was held in Lindau on the day of her funeral to benefit children in Kosovo. 100 musicians participated, 1,000 people attended the concert, and 10,000 Euros were raised. Attempts to put the money to good use in Kosovo failed. Now the money is being used for the children at the School for life as a model project for other projects like it. We don’t want to invent an easy pathway – we’re too weak for that. But we can create examples and start in the places where we find a need.
