Decision-Making Archives - Page 10 of 29

All Three Fields in the Abitur

A German student cannot complete the Abitur in a few favorite subjects. The agreement of the education ministers requires at least one exam subject from each of three fields: languages, literature and the arts, the social sciences, and mathematics, the natural sciences and technology.

At least two exam subjects must come from German, mathematics and a foreign language. The ministers describe the aim as a deepened general education. The agreement dates from 7 July 1972, here in the version of 16 March 2023.

One Topic, Five Perspectives

In German primary schools, children learn about the world in a subject called Sachunterricht. Its national framework describes five perspectives: social science, natural science, geography, history and technology.

Saxony’s teaching guide says that understanding of the world always develops “mehrperspektivisch, vernetzend”, from several perspectives and by connecting them. A child-centered Sachunterricht, the guide says, looks at a topic from different perspectives and links individual areas of learning. The national framework also names themes that connect the perspectives, such as mobility, sustainable development, health and media.

Body, Mind and Circumstances

In 1992 the German Medical Assembly created an independent medical specialty for psychotherapeutic medicine, with five years of specialist training. Since 2003 it has been called psychosomatic medicine and psychotherapy.

Basic psychosomatic care asks doctors to include biological, psychological and social factors in diagnosis, treatment and the understanding of illness. The physician Thure von Uexküll (1908–2004) helped establish psychosomatics as a university discipline in Germany. He worked with the bio-psycho-social model.

No Funding Without the Whole Picture

A German town that wants federal and state money for urban renewal must first write an Integriertes Stadtentwicklungskonzept, an integrated urban development concept. It is a condition for almost all funded projects. Its purpose is to make sure that as many local interests as possible are considered systematically.

The Bavarian municipality of Wörthsee completed its concept in June 2019. The chapters cover population and households, green space and landscape, the economy, social infrastructure and mobility. The concept works out the main connections and dependencies between them.

The Ethics Commission on Nuclear Power

After the Fukushima accident, the federal government set up an Ethics Commission for a Safe Energy Supply. It began its work on 4 April 2011. Its seventeen members included Cardinal Reinhard Marx, Bishop Ulrich Fischer and the sociologist Ulrich Beck.

The report was handed over on 30 May 2011. It said that reducing the risks to purely technical aspects would not meet the demand for ganzheitliches Denken, holistic thinking. “Ökologische, wirtschaftliche, gesellschaftliche und technische Risiken sind zudem eng miteinander verzahnt.” Ecological, economic, social and technical risks are closely interlocked.

The commission concluded that, with the measures it proposed, Germany could complete its exit from nuclear power within a decade.

Every Interest Weighed

When a German municipality draws up a development plan, it must weigh the public and private interests that matter for the plan “gegeneinander und untereinander gerecht”, fairly against each other and among each other. This is the rule of § 1 (7) of the Federal Building Code.

In 2021 the Bavarian Administrative Court reviewed a development plan for the northern edge of a village. A neighbor objected to how the plan dealt with noise from a brewery, the distance to a biogas plant, a second access road and the drainage of rainwater. The court upheld the plan, because noise and odors had been investigated and weighed.

The court explained when such a plan fails. It fails when no weighing takes place at all, or when something is left out that should have been included.

Networked Thinking

Vernetztes Denken, networked thinking. The scientist Frederic Vester (1925–2003) made the phrase common in Germany. When he died, Der Tagesspiegel called him the “Erfinder des vernetzten Denkens”, the inventor of networked thinking.

Vester was a member of the Club of Rome. He developed a sensitivity model for analyzing complex systems. One of his best-known books is Die Kunst vernetzt zu denken, the art of thinking in networks.

The Science of Relations

In 1866 the German zoologist Ernst Haeckel defined a new science in his work Generelle Morphologie der Organismen. He called it Oecologie: “die gesammte Wissenschaft von den Beziehungen des Organismus zur umgebenden Aussenwelt”. It was the whole science of the relations of an organism to the world around it.

Haeckel counted all the conditions of existence among these relations, in the wider sense. The Federal Environment Agency lists his definition in its chronicle of environmental history under the year 1866.

Everything Is Interaction

Alles ist Wechselwirkung. Everything is interaction. Alexander von Humboldt wrote this sentence in 1803. The researcher Tobias Kraft says of it: “Wenn es eine Humboldt-Formel gibt, dann ist es dieser Satz.” If there is a Humboldt formula, it is this sentence.

Humboldt wanted to explore the larger connections behind each single observation. The Humboldt scholar Ottmar Ette calls his science a Vernetzungswissenschaft, a science of connections.

The Whole and Its Parts

Das Ganze ist mehr als die Summe seiner Teile. The whole is more than the sum of its parts. This is the guiding principle of Gestalt psychology. Its more precise form is Das Ganze ist etwas anderes als die Summe seiner Teile, the whole is something other than the sum of its parts.

Max Wertheimer, Kurt Koffka and Wolfgang Köhler worked together on the theory from 1910, first in Frankfurt and later in Berlin.

The sentence is often credited to Aristotle. In his Metaphysics, Aristotle wrote that the whole is something besides the parts.