Autor: Thomas Stöckli

The results of schooling that leaves young people ill-equipped for life becomes more and more apparent: Youth in all of todays’s school systems rate their education with its lesson content as generally irrelevant to their future lives. It is often overlooked in the everyday school life that young people want to experience and discover in the content of their school lessons ideas, attitudes, skills, knowledge and teaching approaches which correlate comprehensively with what they consider to be life in general, and their lives in particular. They are seeking places through which they can experience learning that is appropriate for their age, for their lives and through which they can achieve fuller maturity. At the foundation of this dissertation lies the conviction that today‘s school system must undergo a fundamental change if it wants to meet the needs of today’s youth. With this cause in mind the attempt has been made to develop a new paradigm of learning as follows: Out of the experience in practice and learning in life results an individual processing and reflection within the school. The academic oriented practice research of the adult finds acute reference to life learning, which I examine in detail in a methodological discussion. The new learning paradigm is based on a polarity of learning, theory and practice, knowing and acting, school and vocational learning in their polarities, each integrated through appropriate interaction- in the sense of a synthesis of the polarity- on a new level, that I designate life-learning. As the fundamental question of this dissertation I scrutinize how our understanding of education and as consequence, the school, must change so that a form of learning is created that addresses and challenges the emotional and psychological needs of today‘s youth, and through this forms a foundation for a worthwhile life. This demands the discussion of relevant questions of society with the background of age and appropriate involvement of youth for the solution of these social problems of our society. With this research intention the endeavour is made to find an attempted solution in form of devolping a central idea that is generated through practice research and in conjunction with case studies assessed for their practicability. This practice research incorporated, as it evolved, the actual literature in this subject area. My ideas, critical reflection and arguments were informed through qualitative surveys in form of expert and pupil interviews, as well as essays from pupils and questionaires, which are all in their entirety printed in the index. Beyond this, I present model projects and solutions for practice, for example the ROJ secondary school of the region Jura, that I founded 20 years ago and where I am today still responsibly active. Methodically my work is based on The Grounded Theory and I refer in my work to the Waldorf pedagogy and its basic understanding in context of life learning.