The traffic light government is working on accelerating the first digital pact for schools and preparing a digital pact 2.0. She is doing this quite quietly, but Federal Education Minister Bettina Stark-Watzinger recently stated in an interview with the Tagesspiegel that progress is being made. What has been neglected in all of this so far must now be tackled urgently: Politicians, federal and state governments, should see daycare centers as places of early childhood education in the Digital Pact 2.0. think along.
Digital policy, regulation, artificial intelligence: the briefing on digitization
Without question, digitally supported school education and the associated infrastructure is the central topic for a future-oriented education system. Let’s think about the goal of the digital pact, which is to teach elementary school students the digital skills that are urgently needed for their education.
In reality, three years later, in many places the German school system is still analogous – and this despite the corona-related, digitally supported homeschooling, which could have meant a digitization boost for learning. The fact that home kindergarten also took place during this time, but without any digital help, is unfortunately forgotten.
Why? Because we only think of digitally supported education from elementary school onwards. And that is completely wrong! But now we have the opportunity to start the Digital Pact 2.0 where the educational path of the vast majority of children in Germany begins: 92.2 percent of those over the age of three attend a day care center or day care – and the trend is rising.
Although daycare centers are now regarded as early childhood educational institutions, they are not part of the educational system from an organizational point of view, but are still assigned to the child and youth welfare system. They are therefore still formally obliged to provide care, not education.
I hope that this assignment will change organizationally for the Digital Pact 2.0 – and not only there. Daycare centers must be officially recognized as educational institutions, belong to the educational system and receive appropriate financial support for the sake of our children and also for the educational professionals. Because education doesn’t just start at school!
The educators in day-care centers no longer only provide care and education, they research and discover, they garden and build, tinker and play, slide pearls onto the slide rule together with the children and discover the basics of computer science.
Today, society is demanding more and more skills and performance from educators in early childhood education. What opportunities would arise for children and professionals if the learning goals of day-care centers and primary schools could be coordinated.
At the same time, upgrading the day-care center to an educational institution would result in the long-overdue upgrading of the professional field of early childhood education, incidentally one of the largest growth markets for jobs in Germany. According to data from the German Youth Institute, more than a quarter of a million new jobs have been created in child day care over the past decade.
For years, studies have shown that early childhood education in day-care centers lays the foundations for a successful educational career for girls and boys, including the STEM skills that are so urgently needed today and in the future. In our call for the “Digital Pact Kita” from 2021, we demand that pedagogical staff in day-care centers, just like their colleagues in schools, be given the opportunity to continue their education digitally, for language training, for MINT and also for the use of digital media in everyday education .
To do this, they need the technical equipment – at the workplace in the day-care center. If daycare centers are equipped with digital devices and the associated infrastructure, all children, regardless of their social background, can have the opportunity to learn how to use digital media in a responsible, creative and self-determined manner.
With the Digital Pact 2.0, we should take the opportunity to leverage potential and to think about the digitally supported educational path of children – as a continuous, digitally supported process from daycare to graduation. The basis for further education, including an understanding of digitality and its benefits for the children, our specialists of tomorrow, is laid in day-care centres.
