Election posters support preserving the Gymnasium in Germany

Today I’m writing my last post for this blog. For two months we’ve been blogging about education in our home countries. I’ve learned a lot about education in other parts of the world, but also about the German system.

When talking about these subjects, I recognize a certain pattern: Often an education system’s performance is only evaluated by looking at the numbers of students who go on to get higher degrees or earn better marks – in other words, those who seem more prepared for the job market. But there is another factor that makes the educational system tremendously valuable to a society. And this factor is related to the discussion with my friend Katharina that I posted: Pre-schools and schools offer a very important opportunity to bring the members of a society closer together. Yet, Germany doesn’t fully seize this opportunity. On the contrary, the three-tiered school tracking system in many German states furthers the division of our society.

While I had contact with children from all across the social spectrum during my time in elementary school, I stayed friends mostly with students who were also able to go on to a Gymnasium after fourth grade (To have a better idea of what I mean, have a look at my overview of the German school system here). Only at 17 did I hang out with my old classmates again. By then, they had finished other kinds of schools known in German as Hauptschulen or Realschulen. These reunions are traditional in our village: Those who are 18 years old organize a festival each summer. In many cities, traditions like this don’t exist anymore, and neighborhoods and social clubs tend to be divided up along class lines. Schools could be one of the few places left to work against our society breaking apart into separate classes because all children have to attend them.

Politicians often neglect this fact. In the state of Rhineland Palatinate they have abandoned the concept of the Hauptschule. There wasn’t a lot of resistance against this reform. The existence of the Gymnasium wasn’t questioned. Many students attending a Gymnasium and their parents regard their school as a symbol of their achievement and status. Yet, these students miss a lot of opportunities for learning how to socialize with other groups of people. They can also lose sight of the realities faced by many people living in their country.

My high school - a gymnasium - offered a rather cloistered environment

It is still understandable that many parents don’t worry about this as long as their children will have better chances in the job market. They think that their children will learn more easily in this protected environment. Research to the contrary is often powerless against such convictions. For this reason, many parents organized demonstrations when the Gymnasium was to be abandoned in Hamburg. And politicians in Germany’s liberal party proclaimed on their posters during the election campaign in North Rhine-Westphalia: “Keep the Gymnasium!”

Can we thus regard the fact that politicians don’t touch the Gymnasium as an election strategy? After all, the most politically active people usually send their children to one. In the socially disadvantaged parts of society, on the other hand, children often don’t make it to a Gymnasium, and there are very few people who would organize any kind of demonstrations or collect signatures or step up in front of a camera to make their point. Additionally, these people vote less often than those with a higher income and a better education.

I would like for committed politicians throughout Germany to no longer regard the Gymnasium as “untouchable” in the future. I also want them to support reforms that will really bring about fair opportunities and stronger cohesion in our society. After all, we have so many more financial resources in Germany than many other countries have. Shouldn’t it be possible to come closer to realizing these goals?

Bild1: FDP-Wahlplakat währen NRW-Wahlkampf

Bild2: Mein Gymnasium bot ein sehr behütetes Umfeld: Es war ein katholisches Mädchengymnasium

My friends and me - on different paths than our parents

Emmy wrote that people increasingly need to be better qualified to find jobs in Kenya. The situation in Kenya is different from that in Germany, of course. But here we young people also need more and more qualifications to get a good job – and many of us actually have these credentials. I talked with my girlfriends about how our educational training and our lives as a whole have changed compared with our parents’. We have been friends for years. Some of us even went to the same kindergarten, so we were educated in the German school system at the same time.
Five of us finished Gymnasium with an Abitur, a diploma that allowed us to study at a university afterwards. And two of my friends first finished at a Realschule and then did their Abitur at a Gymnasium specializing in economics (here I wrote more about the German school system). Afterwards, they finished vocational training. One of them now studies on the weekends alongside her job.

The majority of our parents, in contrast, didn’t study at university. Four of us are the first ones in their families to go on to college. But this is not the rule in Germany. If you take 100 children whose parents didn’t go to college, 24 will go on to university themselves. But when you look at 100 children of academics, statistics show that 71 of them will attend university.

But our academic degrees aren’t the only difference between our education and that of our parents. Six of us have studied abroad or worked while travelling in another country (Pavel wrote more here about gap years). No wonder that all of us speak English decently. That is a contrast to our parents: Most of them know only a little English. But, after all, they didn’t need it for being successful in their jobs anyway. Often our fathers earned enough money to support their families. Thus, our mothers didn’t have to work full time and could care for us children.

While we learn, live abroad, and make plans for our free time, our parents had very different worries at our age − particularly the ones who didn’t study. My father had already bought a house when he was my age. My mother had just had her second child; her first one − me − was already four years old. None of us seven friends bear that much responsibility. All of us are unmarried, and no one of has a child or a house.

Our generation has been taught to be flexible and mobile

After all, why should we plan on building a house? We, the young work force, are supposed to be flexible and willing to move. One of my friends, for instance, was told at the beginning of her training for becoming a teacher that, after finishing their training, the future teachers wouldn’t be able to choose where they work. The state would appoint them to schools they would be needed at. Whether they had a house in another city wouldn’t play a role. Of course, things aren’t very different when it comes to the private sector, but at least you can choose your employer more freely.

I don’t want to say that this is negative. We are enjoying these freedoms that have also been made possible by our parents. It is great to speak English fluently and to have lived in different places worldwide. At the same time, it’s amazing how much our way of planning our future has changed from that of our parents, how many more unknown variables we must deal with. While our parents thought already in their mid-20s that they would become old in the town they had been born in, some of us don’t even know what the five next years will bring.

Ultimately, I don’t think it’s just more qualifications that the job market demands – but also more flexibility.