System failure.
Feb. 21st, 2006 06:17 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
sister_luckUN condemns German school system.
This pretty much sums up why I work at one of the few comprehensive schools and not at one of the selective grammar schools. Of course, I went to a grammar school myself as there were even fewer comprehensives around back when I was 10 and the one that was closest had a rubbish reputation. Actually, it still has a pretty bad rep and this is part of the problem with our education system:
The comprehensives are open to children with all abilities, so we accept kids who would otherwise have to go to a Hauptschule (the name - main school - is terribly misleading, as less and less parents are willing to send their kids there and these schools end up with kids whose parents don't care much about education or whose German is so bad that they don't understand the education system and it has become a school for the children who are left behind), a Realschule (which was originally intended for the children who would later choose some sort of office job, wheras the Hauptschule was for the working class) and the Gymnasium or grammar school which was supposed to prepare you for a university education. The comprehensives offer the same number of places - you have to apply - to each of the groups.
On paper this means that about a third of our pupils should be from the top ability group. In reality, parents who are confident that their child will survive and thrive in the highly competitive and rather impersonal grammar schools will often send their kids there, so they don't have to mix with the unwashed masses. If your kid is intelligent, but slightly odd, you'll prefer to send it to one of the comprehensives as they're better equipped and more willing to deal with a kid with behavioural or social problems. The same goes for kids who might have a recommendation for a grammar school, but who had to struggle to get that far. Thus, we end up with more difficult kids and then our results are unfairly compared to those of the Realschule and Gymnasium.
We don't mind that we get the more challenging pupils, but the big political discussions are tiresome. Of course, to the conservatives the comprehensive schools are all about making everyone the same and spreading communist ideas. This may sound exaggerated, but it is rooted in the debates of the late 60s and early 70s and I'll never forget the pitying look some of my Gymnasium colleagues gave me when I told them that after my training I would start work at a comprehensive.
Edited because a four-letter-word shouldn't have four asterisks.
This pretty much sums up why I work at one of the few comprehensive schools and not at one of the selective grammar schools. Of course, I went to a grammar school myself as there were even fewer comprehensives around back when I was 10 and the one that was closest had a rubbish reputation. Actually, it still has a pretty bad rep and this is part of the problem with our education system:
The comprehensives are open to children with all abilities, so we accept kids who would otherwise have to go to a Hauptschule (the name - main school - is terribly misleading, as less and less parents are willing to send their kids there and these schools end up with kids whose parents don't care much about education or whose German is so bad that they don't understand the education system and it has become a school for the children who are left behind), a Realschule (which was originally intended for the children who would later choose some sort of office job, wheras the Hauptschule was for the working class) and the Gymnasium or grammar school which was supposed to prepare you for a university education. The comprehensives offer the same number of places - you have to apply - to each of the groups.
On paper this means that about a third of our pupils should be from the top ability group. In reality, parents who are confident that their child will survive and thrive in the highly competitive and rather impersonal grammar schools will often send their kids there, so they don't have to mix with the unwashed masses. If your kid is intelligent, but slightly odd, you'll prefer to send it to one of the comprehensives as they're better equipped and more willing to deal with a kid with behavioural or social problems. The same goes for kids who might have a recommendation for a grammar school, but who had to struggle to get that far. Thus, we end up with more difficult kids and then our results are unfairly compared to those of the Realschule and Gymnasium.
We don't mind that we get the more challenging pupils, but the big political discussions are tiresome. Of course, to the conservatives the comprehensive schools are all about making everyone the same and spreading communist ideas. This may sound exaggerated, but it is rooted in the debates of the late 60s and early 70s and I'll never forget the pitying look some of my Gymnasium colleagues gave me when I told them that after my training I would start work at a comprehensive.
Edited because a four-letter-word shouldn't have four asterisks.
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no subject
Date: 2006-02-21 11:33 am (UTC)(I think 4-letter words should be spelled out.)
What you're describing sounds a lot like the discussions that have happened here before the massive school reform from what is now called "the old system" to the eenheidstype. Sounds a lot like your comprehensive schools, hey? And it is. The only difference is that this eenheidstype is compulsory for all schools. It generally means everyone starts the same and then "chooses" later on which way to go. It was designed to make sure every kid got equal chances and kids whose parents were unschooled workers didn't automatically send their kid to a school to learn a "job", rather than have them do the course that'll prepare them for university studies.
The whole reform actually happened two years before I started secondary school. Before that some schools had a comprehansive system (even more comprehensive than it is now) and others still followed the old system, where the kids that did Latin would never be mixed with the ones that didn't do Latin. The discussion was actually the same: we don't want our "gifted" kids to mix with the stupid ones. They'll contaminate them and standards will go down. Really, Germany will learn something from that discussion. (And it still rages on, btw, because eenheidstype isn't completely comprehensive -- the word unity mainly refers to the fact that it's trying to bring a unity in different schooling systems.)
What I always find very striking when talking with friends slightly older than me is that they sometimes have had a completely different schooling than me, because those reforms happened right before I started secondary school and went on a bit after that. Over half a decade the whole education system of secondary schools got turned around. It's only now, with friends five or six years older than me, that it comes into view for me.
no subject
Date: 2006-02-21 11:55 am (UTC)As a teacher, I've seen myself the flaws of a system that led too many kids to failure (while it was supposed to help them), because basically they can't follow the same courses as the others but have to, so they completely drop out but stay in the system and the years passed, and it's getting worse, and at the end when they finish collège, of course they can't go on in secondary school (in Highschool) and they have even less options that they would have had if they had folowed a special path in a different system.
no subject
Date: 2006-02-21 12:50 pm (UTC)The biggest problem we have is the famous "cascade system". Children start with Latin, because this path is considered "better". They fail and go to another path and so on. The system excludes them again and again from certain paths, where they could have chosen that path that fitted them better in the first place. Failure and being excluded leads to frustration, which leads to kids that don't want to be in school anymore.
I had A-students, technical students and B-students last year. The technical and B-students all said the same to me: the A-students (paths that lead to higher education) are considered better than us. There is a general problem of contempt for technical paths and B-paths. Whereas especially the difference between technical and A isn't a difference of dificulty, but of where it's leads the student and what it's about. A is a more general, theoretical education, whereas T is a bit more job oriented and can be very technical, but as difficult as an A-path.
The system that we use now was actually designed to give the students the possibility to taste a couple of things before choosing, but its outcome is perverse. Some paths are considered "better" than others and because of that they all want to "try" it. It's also the reason why some paths end up being "the bin" for certain students. They really want to stay in an A-path, but are excluded from several other paths...
I think the problem is bigger than simply a system that needs changing. There's also a lot of mentality that needs changing.
no subject
Date: 2006-02-22 07:30 am (UTC)In some way, the comprehensive schools are quite selective, too, as we start grouping kids in ability sets after the first two years in Maths and English, and then after four years in German and Chemistry as well, so there's a lot of competition and also frustration connected to that. This means that in the last two years of 'middle school' the kids work towards different types of 'certificates' - meaning they can go on to college, specialised college or into an apprenticeship. But in quite a lot of subjects they are taught together and they've always got the chance to aim for a higher certificate to qualify for secondary education - technically up to their last year in 'middle school'.
And yes, they tried to make the comprehensives compulsory in some states, but there were too many people against it, so we've got both systems existing next to each other which leads to more problems. Of course, education being the responsibility of the federal states and not of the central government doesn't help much either.