The origin of manufactured waste in school

Having gone to this school for about six years pupils should have realized that there is an above-average importance for tradition and analogous to that for good behaviour at our school. Along this fact or maybe special orientation there is also the aim of keeping the school free of rubbish first of all the Remter.

To tell from my own experience there is a large amount of papers crumpled or torn to pieces, plastic packaging waste or paper napkins from the Mensa left either on tables in Remter, Mensa or class rooms or directly and maybe more honestly on the floor. Recently the quantity of rubbish from the baker’s shop on the other side of the street grows. After breaks pupils just left their rubbish on their tables. Whether they know about what they do or just forget going to the rubbish bin should not be discussed in this passage. Throwing rubbish from table to table or as a kind of battle at each other or deliberately onto the floor which is often found in lower grades can be subordinated to adolescent’s behaviour. So there are two kinds of producing rubbish, firstly in a wilfully way as a kind of adolescent's false independence and secondly from my point of view the more interesting one with just forgetting or because of a lack of perception.

Nevertheless there were taken measures against both kinds of behaviour. Changing classes are said to clean certain parts of the school building during a week. In each break and after the sixth lesson some of these pupils clean up the Remter and the cafeteria on a schedule. Moreover teachers are said to force their pupils to pick up rubbish, not only their own one. According to a supportive society and maybe church's ideal the pupils are told to act in solidarity with each other and to value foreign work.

Seen from a pragmatical perspective those measures are the only ones to take. Other ones would be too strict and because of that not possible to pass and concept. Although knowing that those measures possibly don't work, school shows its intention and at least a bit authority. Actually the situation did not improve in that way it should have from my point of view. Rubbish remains on the floor. Nearly no pupil picks up other one's rubbish when a teacher does not force him. So you can conclude that persons of the school have to be forced to act in solidarity. They don't act like this on their own. So there is no possibility to change the pupils' relationship to their school. This very relationship causes the behaviour towards it. A law although this is not its aim isn't able to change this root of behaviour, the pupil's will. When speaking about somebody's conscience this guilty conscience cannot change the true relationship to the school. The conscience in general is an expression for an artificial correction of true behaviour. A pupil that picks up rubbish that he haven't caused because of his conscience actually lies. A person like that maybe would have forgotten own rubbish which is the true behaviour. The following shall give the cause for this lack of perception.

To understand how real sympathy with the school comes into being the origin of the conscience can be used. So you can ask for this conscience's content which can be described as the ideal of being a “good” human. So it is a good human's characteristic to behave in a nice or sympathetic way. But shouldn't every pupil behave like this in his school because it is his own school in a not artificial way? Where is the ideal that creates those behaviour coming from? It isn't produced by the pupil's will but is foreign. Therefore somebody who acts because of his conscience alienates his own school. This is what is called lying. There is only one possible theory left: The pupil does not consider his school to be his own. The relationship to his school has become alienated not because of somebody else, school politics or policy in general but because of the pupil's aim itself. He just uses the school as kind of springboard for his career. My intention is not to criticise the pupils or appeal but to determine the cause of behaviour. I would rather like to describe the change in world he is part of. Thus expressed in a conventional way the pupil is “free” or “emancipated” because of not being “oppressed” by his school. Actually he is more dependent than every other human because of betraying his own, his own school, maybe also his own state and his own town of birth and his own origin in order to serve the general foreign.

This is a behaviour that appears strange at first glance but is inescapable on closer inspection. The imagination of Egyptian peasants having build up the pyramids freely seems to be unrealistic today.

Simon Iselt, 2010