Government initiative on digitalization strategy for schools: Bismarck has listened to us!

The government has explicitly taken on board the views of IT&Telecom companies. Applause for the programming initiative. What remains is implementation, with a focus on leadership.

"We warned Bismarck several times" is a story about how a Swedish rural newspaper in the 19th century overestimated its impact. Through Ministers Fridolin's, Hadzialic's and Kaplan's explicit reference to the views of the IT&Telecom companies in their announcement yesterday about a national digitization strategy for schools, we can see that our efforts have been anything but overestimated.

Unlike the Alliance's proposal for a digitization strategy (which came after they left government power, mind you), which was also permeated by the ideas of the IT&Telecom companies, the government also puts a special focus on programming in its proposal. Let's hear it for that - even if we are happy to advocate the broader concept of computational thinking.

We also appreciate that the ministers highlight the IT strategic competence of school leaders as one of the areas of focus - the importance of leadership cannot be overemphasized.

What we are missing in the government's proposal (which is about a future assignment to the National Agency for Education) concerns teacher training, which is in need of a thorough modernization - the teachers of the future should not be trained with yesterday's methods. Apart from this, it is probably a "check" on most of what we said in the Decision Book two years ago.