Education/Training

There is now a lot of talk about education, political education, education in general and leadership development in particular. However, if you look at the educational landscape of companies, there is little education to be found. What is to be found is rather an attempt to search and exploit the rich treasure trove of cultures for suitable tricks and methods to increase performance. It is about tools that can be implemented directly and that bring the greatest possible measurable benefit. This is understandable, because it corresponds to the logic of entrepreneurial systems. Unfortunately, the potential of culture and education is missed and the methods and tricks fall flat after a while, like any fad.

Education is about the ability to distance oneself, which makes reflection and differentiation possible on the basis of a great deal of experience gained for no specific purpose, because a wide range of different perspectives can be adopted.

Education needs time, free, unburdened time and, in addition to the courage to engage in debate, the inner freedom to engage with the richness of culture and to allow oneself to be shaken in one’s secure models of thought and judgment. With the pressure to perform and the ever-increasing investment of life time for a career, where is the unburdened time supposed to come from?

There are such time spots in the corporate world – they used to be called seminars and are now training sessions. Unfortunately, they are increasingly becoming training courses, spaces for teaching techniques that training strategists hope will bring quick benefits under the pressure of their own leadership. Empathy thus becomes a psychological technique, a management tool to better assert one’s own leadership will and to achieve performance improvements in employees. Narcissists, and they make up the majority of managers, are good at using empathy as a tool.

If we were concerned with education, then instead of empathy we would speak of compassion and recognize very quickly that this is only possible if people live in a broad horizon of understanding of human possibilities and not only know this as a storage medium knows something, but have gained it as experience – in other words, have something that used to be called heart education.

Talking about this with training specialists, who are themselves under pressure to perform, often leads to results such as: Can we do this in two days? Or can’t we do it through blended learning? Again, this is very understandable in terms of corporate management logic, but certainly not very clever. People often forget how important it is for educational experiences to meet people and often with a teacher who is passionate about the educational content. In India, there is still the knowledge that it takes a guru to give people the opportunity to grow on the path of education and thus become better leaders in the end without the short-circuit of purpose.

Schiller’s aesthetic education remains the key text for education and his advocacy of purposeless play is the royal road to an educational journey.