14. What the school can do now?

We briefly mentioned the pressure to perform earlier. To avoid giving the wrong impression, we would like to emphasise at this point that we are by no means longing for the opposite. We think it is important for young people to perform. Achieving something makes us proud. It satisfies our need for power (power for something, not power over someone) and recognition. Achieving something also strengthens our self-esteem and, last but not least, a good performance always confirms our self-efficacy (cf. Bandura, pp. 237-269) and is thus an important resilience factor.

But we believe that in our school system, especially when it comes to empowering our children, it is quite important that young people also very often have to be given the opportunity to learn emotionally. We must not forget that emotions influence our thoughts and actions to a large extent!

Please remember the following:

Figure 15: Emotions and cognitive functions

And that leads us back to the questions we asked at the very beginning.