The Golden Bead Cube Weighs One Kilogram

Bruner’s enactive stage and Montessori’s materials both understand that abstract concepts must be grounded in physical experience before symbols can carry weight. The touchscreen skips that stage entirely — and the learning data are beginning to show it.

11 December 2025 · 11 min · Sebastian Spicker

The Invisible Entrance Fee: On Privilege, Education, and the Institutions That Reproduce Both

Education is supposed to be the great equaliser. The evidence says otherwise. Bourdieu called it decades ago: schools reproduce the social order they pretend to transcend. Privilege is the entrance fee that nobody admits is being charged.

20 August 2024 · 9 min · Sebastian Spicker

There Is No Such Thing as Full Accessibility — Only Barrier Reduction

The German word ‘Barrierefreiheit’ promises freedom from barriers. That promise is structurally impossible. What we can achieve is Barrierearmut — a reduction of barriers. The difference is not semantic; it has consequences for policy, design, and institutional honesty.

10 May 2024 · 8 min · Sebastian Spicker

Non-Commutative Pre-Schoolers

The same structural reason a toddler cannot put shoes on before socks is why position and momentum cannot be simultaneously measured. Non-commutativity is not exotic physics — it is the default logic of any ordered world.

13 November 2023 · 9 min · Sebastian Spicker

Why Universities Need Their Own YouTube

In June 2022 I presented on educast.nrw at the Tag der Lehre at HfMT Köln. This is the longer argument behind that talk: why universities should not outsource their video infrastructure to commercial platforms, and what a better alternative looks like in practice.

5 July 2022 · 8 min · Sebastian Spicker