Bruner described enactive, iconic, and symbolic forms of representation; Montessori materials make a useful, but not historically direct, comparison. Physical materials can support particular learning tasks, while evidence does not justify treating a touchscreen as a universal developmental failure.
Education is supposed to reward merit, yet German PISA outcomes remain strongly associated with socioeconomic background. Bourdieu’s theory of capital offers one account of how institutions can reproduce advantage; it is an interpretive framework, not the only causal explanation.
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.
Socks before shoes is a useful analogy for order-dependent operations. It does not explain quantum uncertainty, and infant sequence memory is not evidence of group-theoretic understanding. The shared structure is narrower: changing operation order can change, or prevent, the result.
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.