Science and Education

Everybody talks about knowledge. In Germany, technical and scientific findings increasingly determine the economy, media and politics. But do we therefore live in a knowledge society worthy of the name? And where does this path lead?

In 1906, the Brockhaus encyclopaedia knew exactly what “knowledge” (Wissen in German) was: Wissen is a “small town in the Prussian administrative district of Koblenz” on the river Sieg. 4,900 inhabitants, district court, agricultural college. That was all the renowned reference work then knew about knowledge. One hundred years later, Wikipedia knows more. The popular online encyclopaedia lists more than sixty entries, ranging from “Knowledge” (Wissen, the town), “implicit knowledge” and “uncertain knowledge” to “Spiegel Wissen”, “Wissen Media Publishers” and the children’s show “Knowledge Makes You ‘Ah’!“ (Wissen macht Ah!).

If encyclopaedias contain the canon of socially relevant information, then knowledge is enjoying a boom in Germany today. And that everything a person needs to know is no longer in the printed Brockhaus, but rather in the Internet, further points to a striking paradigm change in the country. If before knowledge was only regionally accessible and elitist, now it is supposed to be global, democratic and freely available round the clock. “Open access” is the order of the day. “The power of knowledge for everyone” is the central demand of our times, whose knowledge of the world, according to estimates, doubles every five years.

Media dilutions

As in all industrial countries, so too in Germany the social role of technical and scientific knowledge has fundamentally changed in recent decades. The influence of the sciences has grown steadily. Expert knowledge is in demand. Political policy advice can no longer be imagined without think tanks such as the Bertelsmann Foundation in Gütersloh. Through educational offensives and excellence initiatives Germany is endeavouring to keep its place among the world-class economies. In addition to capital, mineral wealth and physical labour, knowledge has long become one of the most important raw materials of economic development, in which the expert is a “resource”. Whereas the citizen used to educate himself for his own sake, today the human being is human capital, “life-long learning” inclusive.

In the meantime knowledge has also conquered the German media. Today not only the skilled worker but also every viewer of a TV quiz show knows that knowledge pays. But has the German knowledge society therefore developed further? No, says Peter Weingart of the Institute for Scientific and Technical Research at the University of Bielefeld. “Media discourse is at most a dilution of the idea”, notes the sociology professor. A society that talks of knowledge is not necessarily therefore a knowledge society – on the contrary: “It’s absurd”, says Weingart, “that everyone is boasting we live in a knowledge society and at the same time fighting over whether 2.6 or 2.8 per cent of the gross national product should be spent on education and research. It isn’t appropriate that in a knowledge society immigrant children should be disadvantaged while part of the population flees into private schools”.

Even if Chancellor Angela Merkel stated before the Council of the Sciences and Humanities at the end of January 2009 that Germany “has made great headway in recent years towards becoming a knowledge society”, the step from the Federal Republic to the “Republic of Education”, according to Weingart, has not yet been taken by a long chalk.

The digital revolution

In general, it may become impossible in future to base a state on the concept of an “Republic of Education”. The only true boost that the knowledge society has received in recent years is probably that, thanks to the Internet, it has began to assume a transnational, global character. The digitalisation of world knowledge has begun. If it continues, perhaps one day the new knowledge society will form itself in the World Wide Web as an internationally networking “scientific community”.

This development is still in its infancy. And nobody yet knows how knowledge can be globally organised in the Internet. Nevertheless, both the possibilities of this development and its limits and dangers are already visible today. The tendency of large companies to secure patents and copyrights is as opposed to unrestricted development as is the fear of highly technological societies of making the basis of their prosperity downloadable to emerging and other countries. Nobel laureate in physics Robert B. Laughlin therefore spoke long ago in an essay of a “fraud of the knowledge society” that would cheat mankind of its progress.

Who is an expert – and who isn’t?

The fragility of knowledge, however, grows with its digital increase. When everybody can co-write worldwide knowledge, the truth can be re-written at any time. And when everybody has access to knowledge, there flare up fundamental economic, political, social and ethnic conflicts. Should we, for example, prevent information about serious contagious diseases becoming available in the Internet to terrorists, even if doctors may therefore lack important information necessary to save people’s lives after a biological attack?

The Chairman of the Heinrich Böll Foundation, Ralf Fücks, therefore calls for “finding an open, cooperative, error-tolerant and adaptive architecture for the organisation of research and development” that would also “limit the risks of knowledge production [in the Internet], without stifling its potential.” This may well be the greatest challenge for the global, and also for the German, knowledge society in the twenty-first century.