Education Quote by Johannes Rau

Rau’s line lands like a rebuke aimed at the spreadsheet view of schooling: if your definition of “good education” fits neatly into international rankings, it’s already too small. By invoking PISA, he names the technocratic idol of the early 2000s - the comparative test that turned national school systems into league tables and politicians into anxious sports fans. The phrasing “more than Pisa” is deliberately offhand, almost conversational, but it carries the weight of a statesman’s warning: when measurement becomes the mission, culture gets treated as a luxury item.

“Particularly musical education” is the tell. Rau isn’t arguing for vague humanism; he’s defending a specific domain that metrics chronically undervalue because its benefits are slow, social, and hard to monetize. Music is a proxy for the non-instrumental parts of a society: attention, discipline, shared repertoire, the ability to listen and respond. It’s also a quiet argument about equality. When arts education is cut, it’s not wealthy families who lose it; it’s everyone else.

The subtext is political: an economy-first consensus was squeezing public life into “usefulness and marketability,” turning citizens into future workers and schools into pipelines. Rau pushes back with a broader civic mandate: education should form people, not merely certify competencies. He’s not anti-standards; he’s anti-reduction. In a Europe spooked by globalization and “competitiveness,” he insists that what can’t be priced still has public value - and that a nation that forgets this will, eventually, test well and live poorly.