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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.

Published: 25 November 2022 16:56 CET
Updated: 27 November 2022 08:44 CET

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?

‘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.

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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. 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?

German social mobility is terrible in large part due to the Gymnasium system, which decides your fate at age 11 without an exam, entirely on what your teacher thinks.

No wonder immigrant children rarely get a chance. BioNTech's Ughur Sahin didn't get accepted into one https://t.co/P94G5fftbd pic.twitter.com/07p9an6cnG

— James Jackson (@derJamesJackson) November 14, 2022

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.

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

Anonymous - 28 November 2022 at 09:07 CET

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.
Anonymous - 3 December 2022 at 13:05 CET

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.
Anonymous - 3 December 2022 at 13:33 CET

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: How bureaucracy is slowly killing Germany

In the summer of 2022, I attended a Q&A session that Olaf Scholz held with members of the public in the city of Magdeburg. Coming only a few months after the Russian invasion of Ukraine, most of the questions centred on sanctions, energy costs and Berlin’s response to the war.

But the response I found most revealing was on the dull topic of tax reform.

An audience member asked Scholz why the VAT rate on dog food is seven percent but on baby food it is 19 percent. Parts of the system “don’t seem very coherent to me,” the man said with obvious understatement.

“I don’t think you’ll find anyone who understands the list of VAT exceptions,” Scholz replied with a grin, adding that “at any rate I don’t understand it.”

“But I can tell you that all attempts to change it have ended in a massive disaster,” he continued. “If we were to lay an empty table today, we would definitely do differently. But the system is there now and I think we will have to live with it for a while yet.”

It was a fascinating answer. Essentially, Scholz admitted that there are some regulations that are so complex that no one really understands them anymore. But trying to simplify them just isn’t worth the effort.

It reminded me of a story I once heard about Cairo’s famously dysfunctional traffic system.

Legend has it that Egypt invited a group of Japanese planners to come up with a way to fix it. But the Japanese were so befuddled by what they found that they advised the Egyptians to leave things exactly as they were. The system was so confusing that any attempt to tamper with it might only make things worse.

A similar thing could be said of Germany’s regulatory system. It can be contradictory and infuriatingly slow, but open the can of worms of trying to simplify it and you will probably live to regret it.

private pension plans spain

VAT is just one more confusing piece of German bureaucracy. Photo: Mathieu Stern/Unsplash

Summer snow and other oddities of German red tape

VAT serves as a notorious example. But, wherever you look in German life, you will find egregious cases of sprawling and overlapping regulations.

A few amusing examples:

In August 2022, the town of Esslingen in Baden-Württemberg wanted to organise a summer fête to help local restaurants get back on their feet after Covid. The idea was to build temporary food huts that restaurants could rent cheaply. But planning authorities insisted the huts be built to take the weight of heavy snowfall – during a month with average temperatures of 19C. The fête went ahead, but the eventual costs were “exorbitant,” city officials said.

Last winter, the town of Tübingen acted on an appeal from the federal government to cut gas usage. They decided to switch off street lights between 1 am and 5 am, something that would cut energy costs by 10 percent. Shortly afterwards though, they had to backtrack. The measure contravened a regulation on providing light for pedestrians. In the event of an accident they could have been sued.

A landlord in Hanover recently recounted her efforts to turn an empty attic into student housing. Her planning application was first rejected by fire authorities who said that the branches of a tree were blocking an escape route. Their proposal to cut the tree back was then turned down by the city authority for green spaces, which argued that trees form “a vital part of the city scenery” and “must be protected at all costs.”

Flood of new rules

It is not as if politicians aren’t aware that over-regulation is having a stifling effect on society’s ability to function and adapt.

In its coalition agreement, Scholz’ ‘traffic light’ government committed itself to cutting bureaucracy 63 times. There is an entire section in the agreement on how they planned to cut down official paperwork.

But changing such a deep-seated German mentality is a different matter.

In a withering report published in November, the government’s own bureaucracy watchdog, the Normenkontrollrat, concluded that under the current government the costs of bureaucracy “have reached a level that we’ve never seen before.”

Far from cutting back paperwork, the traffic light coalition has loaded companies, administrators and citizens with a whole raft of new rules, the watchdog said. “Ever more regulations have to be observed and implemented in less and less time,” it concluded.

The frustration is being felt most acutely by local administrators, who say that they just don’t have enough staff to cope anymore.

An open letter sent to Scholz by town councils in Baden-Württemberg pleaded that “things can’t go on like this. Ever more laws and regulations, all too often containing mistakes …are simply resulting in an unmanageable flood of tasks.”

Meanwhile, Germany’s revered Mittelstand, or small and medium sized family businesses, has warned that over-regulation is the single biggest threat to their future viability. A survey among middle-sized companies last year showed that they were far more concerned about regulation than energy prices. Other surveys have shown that a majority of companies don’t understand the regulations they are expected to follow, while two thirds say they make no sense.

“Enormous bureaucratic burdens are combining with labour shortages, lengthy administrative procedures, permanently high energy prices and high taxes in a blow to the future of our business location,” warns Marie-Christine Ostermann, head of the association of family business.

Stuck in the analogue era

For some though, the problem isn’t the regulation itself, it is the fact that there are not enough bureaucrats to deal with it all. After all, they argue, the rules are there to ensure that everyone’s concerns are accounted for.

“An unbureaucratic administration would be a nightmare,” protested economist Georg Cremer in a recent article for Die Zeit. “Sure, there can be too much of a good thing… (but) a prosperous social life is absolutely dependent on the government and administration being bound by law.”

Germany’s welfare system, Cremer points out, requires an army of bureaucrats who assess each claimant’s case based on things like the age of their children and their specific rental needs. “Undoubtedly, the welfare system is over-regulated”, he admits, but we also shouldn’t forget that any attempt to simplify it would make it less fair.

The Deutsche Institut für Wirtschaft, a left-wing economic think tank, has therefore argued that the answer to Germany’s woes is not to strip back regulation, but to employ more staff and push on with the digitisation of key services.

That sounds good in principle. But, when it comes to modernising Germany’s ossified public institutions, it is easier said than done.

A law passed in 2017 obliged local administrations to offer close to 600 of their services online by the end of 2022. A year past that deadline, just 81 of the services have been made available across the country.

The reason for the delays? Local governments are using software that is incompatible with the services developed by the federal government. Meanwhile bureaucrats often display a “grievous” lack of knowledge of how to use a computer, a recent analysis by consumer website Verivox found.

Bürgeramt

A man walks to the Bürgeramt, one of the many centres of German bureaucracy. Photo: picture alliance/dpa | Martin Schutt

A German Javier Milei?

In September of last year, Scholz appeared to have finally recognised that things have gone too far.

Doing a good impression of an anarcho-capitalist then running to be president of Argentina, the chancellor gave a rousing speech to the Bundestag in which he called on the country to unite against the scourge of excessive regulation.

“Only together can we shake off the blight of bureaucracy, risk aversion and despondency that has settled over our country for years and decades,” he said. “It is paralyzing our economy and causing frustration among our people who simply want Germany to function properly.”

Two months later, Scholz announced he had reached a “historic” agreement with the federal states to speed up planning processes and to make life “palpably” easier for German citizens.

The agreement, since praised by the Normenkontrollrat as “having a lot of potential,” will mainly muzzle environmental agencies, thus allowing LNG terminals, wind turbines and motorways to be built through sensitive natural environments.

The jury is still out on whether it will simplify your everyday life.

At the start of this year more new laws came into force, including the government’s now notorious gas heating ban.

One that passed with less attention was a decision to abolish child passports. Under the old system you could take your child to your local Bürgeramt and they would give you a Kinderpass on the spot for €13.

Now, all children are required to have proper documents that are valid for six years. The hitch? The passport (which costs €40 and takes six weeks to arrive) is only valid as long as your child’s face remains recognisable.

“The new system makes absolutely no sense for children under six,” the lady at the Bürgeramt told me when I applied for my newborn baby’s first passport this week. “A baby’s face changes so much that you’ll have to get a new one after a year anyway.”

This article originally appeared in The German Review, a twice weekly newsletter full of analysis and opinion on German politics and society. You can sign up to read it here.

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