Jochen Krautz

Teachers are increasingly complaining about chronic overload due to time pressure, excessive bureaucratic tasks unrelated to teaching, documentation requirements, coordination tasks, and external representation rituals. At the same time, the real educational challenges are growing. Teaching and education are becoming more and more sidelined in daily work. One feels trapped in a hamster wheel: there is a frenzied standstill. In this predicament, many sigh: "It’s time for change." Here, the programs for school development and new forms of learning seem to offer promising solutions. However, these measures not only create additional work but also increasingly dissolve the school as a place of teaching and learning and the professional role of teachers. The thesis of this volume is that the phenomena of overload are largely staged, precisely to awaken the willingness to follow the processes of change management. However, these programs are fundamentally apolitical and undemocratic. They undermine pedagogical freedom and exhibit totalitarian tendencies because they impose externally set concepts through manipulative processes. The volume deepens the insights of its first part by examining how the management of schools through change management and school development relates to the concrete experiences of stress in everyday school life, as the contributions link scientific analyses with critical insights into practice. Uncovering the underlying issues helps to contextualize the processes in the education system within one's own field of action. This can empower teachers to reclaim their pedagogical freedom and responsibility in the interest of the younger generation, as well as for freedom, democracy, and culture.