DUniversities are places where people who study and teach in many different disciplines and disciplines meet and gather. The purpose of the university as an educational institution is realized through physical existence, as a common living space, and as the center of the decisive life stage of young people. If you look at the college self-portrait in the advertisement, it is exactly what you can see in the colorful pictures: the campus is a living space. Indeed, in addition to lecture halls, seminar rooms, and laboratories, the library also has workplaces, including canteens and restaurants, sports facilities, lounges and courtyards, grass under trees, and various gathering places for students (and teachers) to gather outdoors. . course.
If one understands education Declaration of Human Rights Article 26 not only stipulates the transmission of information, but also stipulates the “full development of human personality.” It can be seen that closed universities cannot fulfill their educational mission. The purpose of a university as an educational institution is to acquire knowledge, develop social relations, conduct critical and self-organized discussions on the content of the course (and other), the formation of a network, and the widest possible interaction with other people of other origins and dissidents Have real contacts and discussions. According to the Declaration of Human Rights, education should aim to “enhance respect for human rights and fundamental freedoms. It must contribute to understanding, tolerance and friendship among all nations and all ethnic or religious groups.” The closed universities deprive students of The human right of education destroys opportunities for diversity and development. Anyone who, like Björn Thümler, Minister of Education of Lower Saxony, dreams of digitizing universities so comprehensively in the future that students no longer need to live in universities, dreams of their destruction.
It is not a question of whether digital teaching is more effective or even more effective than face-to-face teaching. It is a question of whether the curriculum only constitutes a part of university education, but a question of the formation of universities as public spaces. No matter how the teaching is converted to digital teaching, all aspects of encounters, communication pitfalls, critical discussions about the knowledge learned before and after the course, accidental contacts, etc. are ignored and not replaced. The debate between classroom teaching and digital teaching is a pseudo-argument; it ignores the focus of the university as an institution—only in terms of the effectiveness of content dissemination. Because this is essentially based on the independent communityization of students, in a social form of collective acquisition and self-organization, critical knowledge processing-this is why it is of decisive importance to provide teaching in a common shared location, at the university.
This separated space has now been closed for three semesters, and sometimes has devastating consequences for students who are isolated and magnified from each other, who are deprived of opportunities for daily development, development and contact. If they are deprived of their right to education by closing universities, very good reasons are needed, because human rights are unconditionally applicable. At the moment when everyone wants to protect themselves through vaccination, all measures must be abandoned, the state must return the risk of infection to individuals, and the basic right to education must be applied unconditionally again. In this case, the upcoming winter semester must once again become a normal semester for campus existence, because the mission of the university is not to prevent infection of people who decide not to be vaccinated, but to fully educate.
