Around 400,000 young people start studying in Germany every winter semester.

As great as the euphoria about the higher educational institution may be for many, it is often sobered by the comparison with reality.

At the latest when the first-year students attend their first lecture.

The same spectacle can be observed every year: the freshmen enter the lecture hall whispering excitedly, only to leave ninety minutes later in silence and visibly exhausted.

Because lectures are usually neither didactically nor in terms of content really sophisticated, but above all tiring.

And so more and more students decide to stay away from the lecture hall.

The phenomenon is well known to science, René Bochmann from Chemnitz University of Technology has described it comprehensively with data from a survey of two thousand students.

His results are not that surprising: for students, lectures that teach the basics of their subject over the course of a semester are an outdated, boring and not sufficiently interactive format.

But most professors don't care much, they simply wind through the program of their basic lectures in front of thinned out rows.

You know what the freshmen only suspect: Attending the lecture is actually irrelevant for passing the exam at the end of the semester.

Thanks to PowerPoint, everything relevant to the exam is already summarized on hundreds of slides.

Anyone who memorizes it is more likely to write a good exam.

Nobody has to attend such a Powerpoint lecture, because most professors do no more than read their slides.

They take the format of the lecture literally and historically precisely.

The lecture is an antiquated event that has its origins in the Middle Ages.

That time when books were unaffordable and very few could read and write.

When a scholar read canonical texts to his students, and sometimes dictated them, this made a significant contribution to increasing knowledge due to the lack of media alternatives.

In people's minds and purely materially on paper.

Amazing resilience

That's no longer necessary today, that's for sure.

But why the lecture is still the central form of academic teaching is not understood.

Because books have been affordable for a long time, and struggling with lectures is not a new phenomenon of the present.

Even the Prussian reformers criticized the lectures, who saw a danger for the new ideal of the university in the one-sided constellation of reading and listening.

From then on, the university was to educate critical thinkers who could serve the state with their trained, independent minds.

But how one should learn to think by simply listening and quickly taking notes was a mystery to the reformers.

They demanded a dialogical doctrinal discussion.

As is well known, their efforts brought little, the professors remained true to their lectures.

Their opponents had no choice but to formulate their criticisms over and over again.

This happened on a large scale in the 1968 movement, when the authoritarian teaching-learning situation was criticized, which a democratic society could not do justice to.

But even the 1968s failed to fundamentally change teaching practice.

The resilience of the lecture is amazing.

It survived the advent of the internet just as unscathed.

Where everyone went online, the academic community stayed in the lecture hall – but at least with PowerPoint.

It is ironic that after centuries of media development and unsuccessful criticism, it took the coronavirus, which only convinced the academic community of the weak points of the lecture when public life was paralyzed.

Now even the last members of the university realized that the much-vaunted strength of the lecture hall was just a sham.

As a consequence, however, this did not lead to the format being newly developed, but something else: everything stayed the same.