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OPINION AND ANALYSIS

OPINION: Germany’s unfair school system entrenches inequality

Pupils in Germany are funnelled off into different schools at the age of 11, which map out whether they go down an academic or vocational route. But this model is unfair and disastrous for social mobility, says James Jackson.

Students sit a school-leaving or Abitur exam in Rostock.
Students sit a school-leaving or Abitur exam in Rostock. Photo: picture alliance/dpa | Bernd Wüstneck

This month, 11-year-olds in Germany will receive a letter which will influence their future more than perhaps anything else. The “letter of recommendation” from their teacher decides more than anything else whether the children go on to study academic subjects or more practical ones. 

Perhaps the biggest German success story in recent years, the BioNTech Covid-19 vaccine, might not have happened due to the inequalities of opportunity in this system. Uğur Şahin, a scientific genius to whom the human race will be eternally grateful, wasn’t recommended to Gymnasium. His teacher didn’t recognise his obvious intelligence and his parents didn’t know how to argue against this. If it wasn’t due to the intervention of a German neighbour, it is quite possible the BioNTech vaccine wouldn’t have happened. 

When this story came out, a hashtag about being a good neighbour trended on German social media. But rather than being a good neighbour, wouldn’t an improvement be to get rid of an arbitrary system that can condemn bright children through oversight, luck, prejudice or malice? 

READ ALSO: What parents should know about German schools

‘Disastrous’ for social mobility

This idea of streaming children into different schools based on ability may sound meritocratic, similar to the grammar school system beloved by many conservatives. But the German school system is grammar schools on steroids, and it has had disastrous results for social mobility; Germany has some of the worst in the developed world, with only 15 percent of young people whose parents didn’t go to university end up graduating from one, four times less likely than those with parents who did. It’s not just about education: Germany is second to last in the OECD in how many people rise from the bottom 25 percent to the top 25 percent economically too. Reports make clear these discrepancies aren’t just about the streaming system – low uptake in early childhood education and below EU average education funding also play a role.

The school system differs slightly across each state but basically there are three types: Gymnasium, Hauptschule and Realschule. Gymnasium are the most academic and pupils go on to do Abitur, which is usually needed to get into university. Students can transfer from one to another, but by most accounts it isn’t easy. And while Gymnasiums and school streaming or tracking does exist in other countries, Germany has the strictest form of it. 

PODCAST: The big problem with the German school system and can you pass a citizenship test?

Rather than being based on an exam such as Britain’s 11+ model (which itself benefits parents with the means to hire private tutors or the time and education to help their children study) it is based arbitrarily on the opinion of an individual teacher, who parents often make efforts to impress. Yes, teachers in Germany are highly trained professionals, but all people have unconscious biases and some people have conscious ones. Blind studies show that children with non-German or working class names like Kevin receive worse marks for the same piece of schoolwork. 

It seems bizarre and unfair to make the decision at such an early age when children develop at different speeds – that’s if you need to make such a decision at all. Some of the school systems with the best results in the world such as Finland’s have a totally comprehensive system with no streaming at all. 

Due to reforms in recent decades, the letter of recommendation is only compulsory in three German federal states, this isn’t necessarily a huge improvement. A 2019 study “The Many (Subtle) Ways Parents Game the System” showed how parents with more social capital, themselves usually white German and better-off, can get their children into Gymnasium regardless of grades and a letter of recommendation. Is giving pushy parents even more opportunities necessarily an improvement?

Children in primary school in Germany.

Children in primary school in Germany. Photo: picture alliance/dpa | Peter Kneffel

Supporters of the system say that not everyone is suited to academic study and we should allow for all kinds of different paths in life, and point to pretty decent income equality in the country. I agree, someone who gets technical qualifications being able to earn a decent living is something to be proud of in the German system, but why should that be determined by who your parents are? It doesn’t give working class people the opportunity to rise to the top – and changing careers in Germany is notoriously hard. 

As it stands, the system appears quasi-feudal to an outsider, with people passing their societal position onto their children especially in a system where academic titles carry so much prestige that politicians plagiarising PhDs is a scandal. And while most middle class Germans I’ve met are pretty honest that their country could do more to integrate immigrants, there can be a pretty prickly response if you bring up class differences, despite the plethora of Von’s and Zu’s in media, politics and industry. I received far more backlash online with this topic than any other, from education professionals with academic titles galore. It made me wonder, if a teacher is going to relentlessly savage a professional journalist for expressing a critical opinion, how will they treat a misbehaving student?

Education reforms are ‘controversial’

There have been attempts to introduce comprehensive schools or “Gesamtschulen” in various states, but they have hit major roadblocks from furious parents – one might argue they felt their privilege threatened. Education reforms are massively controversial in Germany generally. A striking proportion of Referendums and Citizen’s Initiatives across the country have been about repealing educational reforms, especially those which simplify the German language. No wonder approaching it is political suicide, mostly avoided even by progressive parties like the Left and the Greens. Educated people are a powerful constituency, with more money, representation and power. Meanwhile those disadvantaged are less likely to vote or even be able to vote. 

READ ALSO: What foreign parents really think about German schools

For a country that styles itself as the Land of “Dichter und Denker” (poets and thinkers) it’s no surprise that Germany takes education so seriously. Education also played an important role in the development of the country as the so-called Bildungsbürger (member of the educated classes) gained a liberalising influence in the mid 18th Century. But the results weren’t always stellar. The so-called PISA shock of 2008 was the first time that students across Europe were compared with each other, and Germany performed poorly. Though the average attainment has improved since then, it still isn’t as spectacular as many Gymnasium fans think, scoring about the same as the UK which has mostly comprehensive schools, while scoring desperately low for equity in social backgrounds. 

Education and what role the state should play in it is an emotive question. To me, it seems egregious that the state is funding a system that is shown to entrench social and educational inequality and segregate people based on what is more often than not their social class. The philosopher of science Stephen Jay Gould wrote “I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein’s brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops.” In Germany, he may have written that they were consigned to Hauptschule because of their name instead.

Member comments

  1. This article hits close to home. We moved to Germany nearly 3 years ago and our oldest son struggles in school with 1 and 2 in Math, Science, and English, but 4’s and even a 5 in German and History. We recently toured a Gymansium near our house. It was clean, bright, and well furnished. Most of the parents there for the tour were white. We were told based on our sons grades to also tour the Realschule next door to be “more realistic”. We noticed suddenly that nearly all the parents and children were brown or black and from immigrant backgrounds. The school was darker, colder, and certainly less well appropriated. It reminded me of the inner city high school I attended as a youth in the USA. The difference being very clear however. I was a lazy student and struggled with ADHD. Around 16, I finally got my butt in gear and went on to earn a B.S. in Electrical Engineering and a Master’s in Cybersecurity Technology. I went from a childhood living in one room with my parents and siblings to having a home and a very comfortable life. It played through my head as the Director told the parents in the tour that many companies (manufacturing and service) came to get employees from this school. There was no place here for kids like me that were late bloomers. No place for my son who struggles with similar issues as I had. I thought, in the USA, he’d still have time to switch gears, but here, he was finished, set on the path to an assembly line at 11. We are very upset about this and it is one of the many reasons we are considering returning back to the States where you can write and rewrite your story as many times as you like.

  2. I had two German girlfriends who both were tracked at age 11. One was geared towards becoming a worker in a Metzgerei while the other ended up in a business school to become a secretary. Over the years we kept in touch and in our 20s, both moved to the USA. The Metzgerei worker got her degree and became an RN. The other also got her degree and is now the director of a local business. Thankfully they left Germany at an early age.

  3. I had a very different outcome in England, where I grew up and lived until I was 57. As the elder son of two teachers, I was always pushed towards passing my 11+ exam with the highest possible marks so that I could get into a grammar school. I found the effort needed to do this was not too difficult, because there was little else to do in the village where my father was the school’s headmaster, so teaching myself (by reading encyclopaedias and other books) kept me busy. There was no TV in our house, which was advantageous. My mother, who was a qualified ESN teacher, spent lots of time during my formative early years, teaching me the three R’s at home and I well remember her giving me a reading test when I was 7 and being told that I had a reading age of 19 … I wish I still had that!
    I passed the 11+ within the top 2% in my county and went to a direct-grant grammar school as a result. That was an eye opener 🙂

    I sort of lost my appetite for school work during my seven years at that school, not because the teaching was poor, but because my interests were narrow. Sciences and maths; the rest passed me by.

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OPINION AND ANALYSIS

OPINION: Even with German citizenship reform foreigners must be wary of lurch to the far-right

News of Germany's right-wing extremists meeting to discuss how to deport immigrants, even ones with German passports, spells bad news for those thinking of taking up dual citizenship, writes Brian Melican.

OPINION: Even with German citizenship reform foreigners must be wary of lurch to the far-right

It’s been two weeks now since an investigative report by the German media outlet Correctiv first revealed details of a secret meeting held by right-wing extremists in a Potsdam villa late last year to discuss, in the event of their taking power, how to deport millions of people living in Germany – foreigners, foreign-born German citizens, and indeed native Germans who don’t get with their programme.

Fascists gathered around mahogany tables with lakeside views hammering out inhumane plans? Anyone who knows anything about the 1942 Wannsee Conference will, quite rightly, feel a familiar chill running down their spine.

Important things to remember

I write ‘familiar’, because, in some ways, this kind of thing is unsurprising. Nazism was a powerful ideology into which millions of Germans bought whole-heartedly; it – and those millions – didn’t disappear overnight in May 1945. Quite to the contrary: elements of Nazism have persisted, as have those fascinated by it and those who actively espouse it.

What is more, besides the specifically German problem with hateful ideology, fascism is ever-present in other parts of the world, too, always ready to rear its head when it sees the time come. In 2016, a far-right terrorist murdered Jo Cox, a British MP then campaigning against Brexit; when Britain then voted to leave the European Union just weeks later, violent BNP supporters like Tommy Robinson took to the streets in triumph.

Later that same year, Donald Trump was elected as President of the US, bringing with him far-right activist Steve Bannon as chief strategist.

Potsdam

Pictured is the villa near Potsdam where right-wing extremists were revealed to meet in late 2023. Photo: picture alliance/dpa | Jens Kalaene

The UK and US examples are illustrative because they show that, even in countries without a history of industrial mass-murder, the veneer of constitutionality is always thin. Within months of Brexit, hard-line Home Secretary Theresa May – responsible for the ‘hostile environment’ policy which led to the deportation of British nationals from the UK (a.k.a. ‘the Windrush scandal’) – had become Prime Minister. And within days of being inaugurated in January 2017, Trump had already implemented Bannon’s “Muslim ban” by executive order.

Although later declared unlawful, these policies were actually implemented – by civil servants, police officers, and border guards who were simply doing their jobs. For those of us with the potential to figure on fascists’ deportation lists – and as a London-born left-liberal journo with a big mouth, but without several generations of ‘German genes’ to my (Celtic) name, I am not a wholly unlikely target. Neither are you, if you’re a non-native German – it’s important to remember these simple facts.

Nevertheless, the openness with which deporting even those of us who have taken German nationality is being discussed remains surprising. Some Potsdam participants were people with influence. Big-name businessmen, including a major investor in high-street food chains BackWerk and Hans im Glück, were reportedly among the participants. So it isn’t just the fringe nutcases who are plotting against us. Now that this has had a couple of weeks to sink in, we immigrants need to examine our position – without succumbing to panic, but with a watchful eye for the risks we face.

READ ALSO: How worried should Germany be about the far-right AfD after mass deportation scandal?

Reasons not to panic

To start, here are some reasons not to do anything rash. Firstly, although it’s easy to conflate things now that everyone is demonstrating against the Alternative für Deutschland (AfD), currently polling 20 percent-30 percent, the revelations concern an informal far-right grouping, not the party itself.

In fact, the AfD is seeking to distance itself from some functionaries who attended the meeting, primarily for tactical reasons (their involvement gives security services good cause to up surveillance), but also because a few AfD politicians do actually believe that their party is not fascist and see themselves as traditional conservatives. That they’re fatally misguided is no reason to impugn their motives, just their analytical abilities.

As it stands, these ‘moderate AfD’ people agree that deporting people with established residency – and especially German citizenship – would be unconstitutional.

Moreover, the AfD is still, despite its current polling, quite a long way from the levers of power. With an electoral, party-political, and parliamentary system broadly comparable to ours and the rise of the far-right populist Sverigedemokraterna setting in around a decade earlier than that of the AfD, Sweden is a useful guide here. And on a Swedish timetable, we could expect an unstable governing coalition formed against the AfD after the 2025 Bundestag election before, in 2029 at the latest, the CDU goes for a confidence-and-supply agreement with it in order to get back into the chancellery.

A demonstrator holds a placard with crossed-out AfD sign, referring to Germany's far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party during a demonstration against racism and far right politics in Frankfurt am Main

A demonstrator holds a placard with crossed-out AfD sign, referring to Germany’s far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party during a demonstration against racism and far right politics in Frankfurt am Main, western Germany on January 20, 2024.  (Photo by Kirill KUDRYAVTSEV / AFP)

Reasons to keep your guard up

That brings us on to reasons to be wary longer term. Many are overlooking the presence of two CDU members at the Potsdam meeting, and while the party leadership is taking a zero-tolerance approach in this specific instance, much like the British Tories or the US Republicans, the CDU is drawn to right- wing populism like a moth to a lightbulb. Chairman Friedrich Merz loves nothing more than using an evening political talk-show to indulge in a spot of dog-whistle racism and, in Bavaria, sister-party CSU has gone full maverick, in coalition with unsavoury right-wing populists as it chases an increasingly xenophobic electorate.

By the end of the year, the likelihood is that something similar will have happened in at least one eastern German state – potentially in unstable Thuringia, where the regional CDU has long been eyeing up the potential for a minority administration supported by the AfD. Then there’s Saxony, where the AfD is knocking 40 percent ahead of the autumn’s regional election, and which will probably be ungovernable without some kind of pact. Worryingly, the Thuringian and Saxon wings of the AfD are both considered by security services to be genuine, out-and-out extremists – i.e. even further right than the party at federal level.

READ ALSO: Why the far-right AfD’s victory in an east German district is so significant

Reasons to have a contingency plan

This, not the Grand Plans of Potsdam, is the clearest and most present danger to us as immigrants: a Germany in which, first at state level, then nationwide, around a third of the population votes for a party which is, in parts at least, fascist. This, in turn, draws the entire political spectrum further to the right – so expect much more than recent populist pronouncements by (supposedly left-of-centre) Chancellor Olaf Scholz about the importance of “finally starting to deport [failed asylum seekers] at scale” and the matching legislation which recently passed Bundestag. (What’s the German for “hostile environment” again…?)

At least, after some performative scapegoating of refugees, Scholz’ government has been liberal enough to finally allow dual nationality for regular non-EU immigrants looking to become German.

In a worrying sign, this is a change the CDU has already said it would reverse in government; luckily, of course, the reform means those now taking German citizenship will still have their original one as a back-up. Indeed, anyone who gave up a passport to become German in recent years would now be well advised to take steps to getting it re-issued. And people living here with assets abroad or existing claims to residency elsewhere ought to do everything possible to keep them. Just in case…

In case… Well, what? In case, for instance, in 10 years’ time, German society has turned into a distinctly hostile environment in which being foreign-born will be an additional risk factor even if you hold a German passport.

The most probable xenophobic policy (already being floated in some parts of the CDU) will be something like revoking citizenship in case of a criminal conviction. So if you’re a non-native German national, keep your options open – and your nose clean as a whistle from now on. (No crossing the road on a red light anymore!)

Because, to be frank: all the demonstrations in support of people like us are all very well and good, but what would be even better would be a country where almost a third of the population aren’t actively considering voting for a party in which barely-reconstructed Nazi Björn Höcke holds sway. If it ever comes to that, well-meaning demonstrators won’t be there to stop you getting deported.

Sure, a few police officers with principles might resign in protest (or be suspended for not carrying out orders), but there’ll be plenty more to take their place and put the handcuffs on. This isn’t a dig at overly-obedient Germans, by the way: just ask the British nationals sent ‘back’ to Jamaica after a lifetime in the UK in the 2010s.

Or indeed anyone who’s ever experienced deportation – like some of the 14,200 Holocaust survivors still alive in Germany today. Do I think we’re in for a re-run of humanity’s darkest chapter? On balance: no. But then few people in Germany in January 1924 could envision that, just 10 years later, the Nazis would have seized power on around 30 percent of the popular vote.

What would be happening by the early 1940s was, of course, simply unimaginable. Except to those who, in conspiratorial groups, were already talking about it.

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