Struwwelpeter 2.0

Media education in the light of our understanding of the human being 9
The above considerations can be summarised in a table:
Age Birth to approx. To approx. To approx.
age 6–7 age 13–14 age 20–21
Relationship with: Parents and + school and + “world”
surroundings friends
Social relationships Attachment Relationship Encounter
Learning stages Learning linked Learning linked Conscious
with activity with emotion learning
Cognitive stages Self-experience Sense of self-worth Self-assurance
This signature of learning through
discovery must also underlie the curricula
for media education. Here the
consistent motif in the encounter with
the world, constitutive in the first years
of school, is that the children experience
connections. Not individual
chunks of knowledge but conceptual
landscapes or chronological processes
should be experienced and understood.
When children in their second
year at school draw reflections in a
circle and in class 12 mathematically
investigate inversion in a circle, they
encounter the same phenomenon
through activity on the one hand and
then cognitively on the other. If children
in class 3 experience for a whole
year what is involved in making a roll,
from ploughing to baking, they will
have a more thoroughly real relationship
with global economic questions,
ecology, the chemical effect of fire and
much else than if they had to do without
such a basis in experience.
In the following outline of a curriculum
(page 14), the attempt will be
made to do justice as much to the
various ways that children and growing
young people can access the
world as to the social conditions
under which they are growing up.