On June 13 and 14, 2018, a test run for the schools of the future took place at the House of World Cultures HKW in Berlin. In an experimental timetable, the participants of 21 school projects that had taken place within the framework of Schools of Tomorrow tested their contribution to the utopian school of tomorrow together.
kollektiv orangotango accompanied a group of young people from Tübingen, who had explored and tested possibilities of education in society in the project School without School: not within the narrow container that is called “school”, without tests and hierarchical teacher-student relationships, but with encounters between different social groups, collective creative activity and exchange through artistic interventions in public space.
In the experimental school lesson School without School, young people from Tübingen guided the participants from the other school projects in formulating common opinions in discussion and recording them artistically on fabric banners. The banners created in this way, displayed in public spaces, gave their contribution to the discussion about future schools the greatest visibility and thus provided the basis for constructive discussions with passers-by and other younger and older people.
In the school lesson Kiez machen – Schule machen, results of the project Fare Rione – Fare Scuola were presented, which had been carried out by kollektiv orangotango in Naples, Italy, in January 2018. Since the participating students from Naples could not come to Berlin, this workshop was also led by students from Tübingen. Based on personal experiences from their respective neighborhoods, the participants built a utopian city map, full of creative learning spaces, which, drawn on the asphalt, became a walkable playing field.
While we were discussing possible forms of emancipatory education at the HKW in Berlin, concrete spaces in which emancipatory education is already lived are in danger. In Naples, the Centro Sociale GRIDAS is acutely threatened by eviction after more than 30 years of neighbourhoos self-organized education from below. In Granada, the self-administered canteen of the Gómez Moreno School is to be sold to a commercial catering company. Out of solidarity with these friendly realities, we discussed these cases in a workshop at the HKW. This resulted in banners with the demands “Il GRIDAS non si tocca” and “No me toques la olla!!!“, which the students* carried to and put it on the Berlin Wall.
