Caution - made in Germany
The most important question in the NRW Abitur-exam is about digital-viral Germany
Germany's relationship to digitalisation is special. Enthusiasm for the internet is rare in this country. Germans prefer to be sceptical about anything new (especially anything new and digital). Being sceptical has thus become a kind of default response to any kind of innovation. Continuously asking "Can't this be dangerous?" is the guiding question of almost every thinkpiece-text about news ideas, apps or society in general.
"Caution - made in germany" could be the slogan for Germany's social digital discourse (When the most relevant German television programme interviewed a researcher on artificial intelligence, 80 per cent of the questions were about: 😳dangers! ⚠️)
This "do we really need this?" attitude towards the internet in particular (but also towards the new in general) has led to two astonishing consequences, which we can observe wonderfully this Friday in the Abitur exams in the federal state of North Rhine-Westphalia.
North Rhine-Westphalia (NRW) is the largest federal state in Germany. Almost 18 million people live here (for comparison: that's slightly more people than there are Dutch people). Abitur exams were supposed to take place in NRW this week. But one day before the exams, the responsible school ministry cancelled the exams - and rescheduled them for today, Friday (no one found it important that this is the day on which 1.5 million people in NRW celebrate Eid al-Fitr, the festival of breaking the fast, colloquially known as "Zuckerfest").
The reason for this remarkable postponement?
"A massive technical problem" - according to the official justification:
On Wednesday, exams were planned in biology, chemistry, nutrition, computer science, physics and technology. But the centrally set tasks could only be successfully downloaded from the server of an external IT service provider by about one third of the schools. Out of 900 schools, only about 300 succeeded, according to the ministry.
The WDR was there with cameras when teachers in Wuppertal wanted to download the examination papers - the download did not work. Until the evening, then the decision: the exam date will be postponed.
Since then, Germany has been discussing two questions: How could it happen that the download did not work? And: Why are we Germans so stupid when it comes to using the internet?
The second question in particular is a popular narrative in this country - told by people who do not belong to the "Caution - Made in Germany" faction, they look at the digital state of the country with great fatalism and self-irony. Bandwidths are low in this country, but expensive. Fax machines are popular and what does not have to be digital is not made digital - according to this unfortunately not unrealistic self-narrative. With one stupid consequence: it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy!
We are bad at using the internet because we are bad at using the internet.
Besides the question of how to solve the download problem in the largest federal state (and the Abitur exams themselves), this is the most important question of the Abitur exams in NRW: How can we change the view of the new and digital in this state? Away from rejection and ironic self-confidence to the courage to want to shape and improve something...
It would really be necessary.