"Children come into the world as learning machines — and unlearn the joy of learning of all places at school." That, more or less, is how Vera F. Birkenbihl (1946–2011) summed up her critique. The management trainer and bestselling author ("Stroh im Kopf?") was not an academic education researcher but a populariser with a flair for the catchy diagnosis. Her guiding concept: "brain-friendly" learning — and her core thesis that school works systematically against the way the brain operates. It gets interesting once you ask where these structures actually come from.
Birkenbihl's Main Criticisms
Her objections can be grouped into nine points:
- Not brain-friendly. Frontal teaching and passive drizzle contradict how the brain actually learns — actively, by linking, through one's own moments of insight.
- "Bulimic learning". Cram the material before the exam, "throw it up", then forget it. Memorising instead of understanding.
- No links to prior knowledge. New material sticks only when it connects to the familiar (chains of association). School delivers isolated facts with nothing to attach them to.
- No meaning, no relevance. Pupils rarely learn the why. Without a sense of purpose there is no real motivation.
- Fear and pressure block. Grade stress and exam anxiety put the brain into a state in which learning is barely possible; natural curiosity is, in effect, trained away.
- Grades as a poor measure. They measure and sort rather than support, and produce extrinsic instead of intrinsic motivation.
- Lockstep instead of individuality. Everyone the same pace, the same material — differing starting points and speeds are ignored.
- Rote cramming. Against this she set her own methods — the Birkenbihl language method with "de-coding" instead of vocabulary drilling, plus ABC lists and the association techniques KaWa and KaGa.
- Artificial subject separation. Knowledge is broken into drawers instead of being thought of as connected.
The Root: the Prussian School Model
Here the circle closes with our article how the Prussian school system spread worldwide. Much of what Birkenbihl criticises is neither chance nor oversight — it is deliberately built that way, only for the goals of the early 19th century: reliable soldiers, dutiful civil servants and disciplined industrial workers. What counted as a strength then looks like an obstacle to learning now. Birkenbihl describes the symptoms; the Prussian model supplies the structural cause:
- Lockstep, the same pace → age-graded classes: "batch processing" on the factory model, not by maturity or ability.
- The 45-minute period and the bell → the day cut into uniform units; what is rehearsed is obedience to the signal — the barracks and the assembly line say hello.
- Frontal teaching and teacher authority → a top-down system in which subordination itself becomes part of the lesson.
- A standardised curriculum → uniform content for all, centrally steerable and testable.
- Subject separation → carving knowledge into manageable units.
- Grades, ranking, being held back → a selection and sorting function for state and economy, long before any support of the individual.
- Discipline before curiosity → punctuality, diligence and obedience as the hidden but real curriculum.
In other words: the system is optimised for standardisation and compliance, not for individual understanding. That is precisely why Birkenbihl's diagnoses so often hit home — she is criticising the side effects of a design that was never made for "brain-friendly" learning.
The Larger Connection
That an education system rewards obedience and the adoption of ready-made answers is more than a teaching problem. It shapes how we later handle knowledge: someone trained to reproduce the prescribed answer also, as an adult, more readily adopts the majority consensus instead of checking for themselves — exactly the mechanism described in herd behaviour in humans. And where memorising is placed above understanding, it becomes harder to think independently against an established majority opinion. At its core Birkenbihl's concern was a plea for independent, curious thinking — and thus akin to the stance of this site: understand and examine first, then adopt.
A Fair Assessment
Birkenbihl's theses are didactically stimulating but popularly pointed. Some do not hold up against current research — for instance the notion of fixed "learning types", regarded as empirically outdated, or overly neat brain metaphors. Her lasting merit lies less in scientific proof than in the sharp diagnosis and in having brought a broad public the question: why do we actually learn the way we learn — and in whose interest?
Sources
- Birkenbihl, V. F.: Stroh im Kopf? From Brain Owner to Brain User (many editions) — brain-friendly learning.
- Birkenbihl, V. F.: Trotzdem lernen and lectures on "brain-friendly" teaching and learning.
- On the Birkenbihl language method (de-coding instead of vocabulary cramming) and on ABC lists / KaWa / KaGa.
- For the structural background see how the Prussian school system spread worldwide.