Generation Why?

Bologna drowns its Victims in Bureaucracy 

At Freiburg University the new winter semester 2012/ 13 is just about to begin and the bureaucratic wardens of the geko (board of examiners) with great efficiency are no longer responsible for the student as a whole person, the human being. The Bologna reform is a veritable jungle of rules and regulations nobody seems to really understand, not even those advisor with their official sounding titles. Dealing with the overbearing paper pushers behind their desks in tiny cubicles, means anyone with a question is treated as a failure of the system. The 3000 B.A. students are numbers on a screen, but the moment a real human being with questions, insecurities and problems steps through their office door they are reminded, quite forcefully so, that they are only one of 3000. The poor overworked secretary cannot waste any moment to consult her computer to answer any possible questions. Then again the poor number on the screen will one day graduate, become an alumnus and may be granted the status of human being, maybe even in the eyes in the bureaucrats, less than lovingly dubbed the witches of Wertherring. Eastwick is so yesterday.

Generation Y has grown up but gown into their own? If you ask German cultural or educational researchers 10 years after the Bologna Reforms were forced into being it’s time to draw the balance. The cultural review “Kulturzeit” recently broadcasted a special on “Where are the ideals?” forcing the viewer to question the dictum of an increasingly globalized economy and the compliance of politicians in the 1990s, to tweak, squeeze, cut and speed up a well-functioning system. The key word seems to be "enforced conformity" and the 140 public and private universities in Germany gained their very own corporate identities. Now, the new system generates streamlined students, forced into line in three years instead of four.

            Today, it seems university reality is far away from the ideal of educating the young mind to become a whole person. You don’t learn for the school but for life but statistics reveal. An increasing number of graduates are severely lacking in social skills and maturity. Bologna means stress, pressure, no time for friends and family, no in depth understanding of what you are actually doing, only scraping on the surface with an education that is constituted of multiple choice tests, where the student is no longer asked to think but to learn the material by heart and barf it back onto the test paper, no questions asked. There is simply no time to be critical. But the speed up process of doing educational piece-work has enormous costs, not only in terms of learning but also in terms of support.

           The cultural landscape in Freiburg takes up those nagging existential  questions. In its newest project Fear Factory the Theatre Freiburg tries to take a closer look at yet another lost generation plagued by fears and insecurities of finding a niche in this onwards and upwards driven age, where more and more young people decide to stray from the sacred career path. Escapism brought to a whole new scale.