This is a story about schoolbags and their place in the lives of children, teachers, parents, schools and classrooms. Specifically, it is a story about German schoolbags. Some aspects will therefore appear peculiar to the Scottish reader, while others are easily recognised and common, regardless of national or cultural context.
In schools and classrooms, children and young people engage in a lot of activities that are not directly related to the intended teaching and learning. They make and lose friends, turn into teenagers and adults, fall in love and split up. They trade merchandise and services. They do this in private, mostly outside the realms of the grown-ups. Sometimes these activities, which involve highly specialised means of communication, go on during class, under and between the benches, hidden from the teacher who is holding the lesson.
Schools and classrooms are therefore complex and - not only for a researcher - exciting spaces, where aspects of the private and the public, the intimate and the formal lives of pupils, meet. Schoolbags play an important part in this. They are merging points between the private life of children and young people and their public, social life as pupils. Inside schoolbags, items related to the home environment are carried into the school, where some of them must be hidden from the eyes of others, while school tools are brought back home, into the private realms.
The schoolbag is a confined space, an exclave of the private, family life in the public life of the classroom and vice versa. The schoolbag and its contents are equally part (or not part) of the children’s homes and classrooms. This might be one reason why it has not been explored by education researchers until now, despite its exciting and complex nature.
The schoolbag is almost part of the pupil’s uniform, like clothing, but remains unrecognised as an important part of activities and lives in classrooms, although they clearly play a role in them. Schoolbags, in contrast to school uniforms, are so common globally and assumed to be so practical and necessary that the effects and politics of their existence have not been recognised in the same way as that of school uniform (a phenomenon more distinctly associated with countries such as the UK). A world without schoolbags is not imaginable. So, what is actually going on in and around them?
Though researchers seem not to be bothered with schoolbags, pupils, teachers and parents are very concerned about them at times - albeit for varying reasons. For children, the schoolbag is an important part of the transition between being a child and becoming a pupil. It is important as a rite of passage: the schoolbag maketh the pupil.
Usually, German children get their first schoolbag some time in spring the year they start school, when they are about 6 years old. This gives them time over the summer to play and practise by carrying the bag and loading it with pencils, books and other more or less school-y stuff. German schoolbags come in many shapes and sizes, resembling everything from basic backpacks to hardy cabin luggage.
Usually, the first schoolbag you get looks like a modernised version of what is commonly called a satchel in English. “Satchel” is also a much more literal translation of the common German terms Schulranzen or Tornister than “schoolbag”. The satchels come in different colours and prints with the logo of your favourite football club or a picture of the latest Disney princess; it is astonishing how gendered the market is. The German trade in schoolbags is highly differentiated and worth millions of euros, with several companies competing for children’s desires and parents’ wallets.
The kind of schoolbag you can call your own is therefore a clear statement to your fellow first-graders and later classmates. Every autumn, millions of pupils wonder if their old schoolbag is still trendy in the eyes of others, or if it is time to trade the bag from which Lightning McQueen or My Little Pony are smiling for a more “grown-up”, casual backpack version. The sturdily designed Fjällraven Kånken backpacks from Sweden, for example, have been particularly popular of late.
Here, the parents and their concerns enter the scene, because the decision - which schoolbag to buy - is not least an economical one, with the most expensive models easily reaching the €200 (£170) mark. And that does not include the matching gym bag and pencil case. Brand, style and design of your child’s schoolbag - and whether you can even afford a new one whenever it is technically or fashionably necessary - are not only a question of making your child happy and giving them a good start among their peers: they are also markers of the socioeconomic status of your family. In that sense, the German schoolbag is the complete opposite of a uniform, where everyone must have the same as everyone else.
An even greater concern for most parents, according to the alarmist warnings from “experts” in the news at the beginning of every school year, is the weight of the schoolbags and the possible impact on the spines of children still in growth.
It is not uncommon for a 10-year-old’s schoolbag to exceed the weight limits for cabin luggage, which makes the roller trolley design a very reasonable choice. Depending on the distance between home and school, the heavy bags can be on the children’s back for more than half an hour each morning and afternoon.
The weight discussion brings us neatly from the outside to the inside of the schoolbag, and this never-ending source of controversy among parents, pupils, teachers and others: what should and shouldn’t be in a proper schoolbag? The answers may differ, but all agree that the content shall not be too heavy. Besides different writing and drawing tools and exercise books, pupils often have to carry large hardcover textbooks between home and school. Since digitalisation and the change to e-books is still a project for the future in most German schools, this will be true for years to come.
The logistical problem of the constant transportation of books and pens is that the pupils can choose between the risk of forgetting crucial learning materials and leaving them at home - which is the moment when the content or rather the lack of content in the schoolbag becomes the teachers’ business - or carrying around everything all the time, slowly ruining their backs.
Pupils usually borrow the textbooks from the school for a year at a time before they are passed on to the next cohort the year after. Since textbooks are expensive for the schools, they are supposed to last a couple of years, putting great responsibility and pressure on the individual pupil to return them in near-mint condition at the end of the year. The lurking threat of having to pay for eventual damages makes even the most laid-back pupils get their act together and wrap them in plastic or paper covers. But, as we have seen, textbooks spend a substantial time of their life inside schoolbags, making them a more and more hazardous environment for any kind of flimsy paperwork as the school year advances.
The main ingredient put into the schoolbag at home is food and drink. (Not all German pupils stay at school the entire day, and they are not entitled to school meals, which makes it necessary for them to bring their own snacks and lunches.) It is a well-known phenomenon that pupils forget to take uneaten food out of their schoolbag as much as they forget to put their maths book inside it, resulting in growing sediments of uneaten fruit, crumbs and spilled orange juice. When occasionally remembered, the aforementioned maths book is then placed in this puddle and ruined forever. The cultivation of such a pool at the bottom of the schoolbag is a well-established strategy to push even the most resistant parent into remortgaging the house to buy a new bag.
Besides nutrition and learning materials, pupils put all kinds of stuff into their schoolbags that they deem necessary for their lives at school, home and the journeys in between. These might be a teddy bear for comfort, Panini football cards for trading or a bicycle chain for - well, whatever, since the owner in question sometimes does not even own a bike. Why a particular item is in the schoolbag rather than another might not be obvious to anybody else but its owner.
The apparently humble schoolbag, then, can in fact be a source of great mystery - but we researchers are finally starting to rummage about inside.
Jakob Billmayer has a PhD in education and is a senior lecturer and researcher working in teacher education in Sweden. Together with his friend Simon Dörr, who also has a PhD in education and is headteacher at a school in Bavaria, he has started a research project on schoolbags’ content and its meaning, which he presented at the recent annual conference of the Scottish Educational Research Association. He can be emailed at jakob@billmayer.se
This article originally appeared in the 24 January 2020 issue under the headline “The world on their shoulders”
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