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.
