Archiv für April, 2009

Alright, sorry guys, I promised I’d write more in English and haven’t for about a year..but I couldn’t help but notice that more and more anglophone people seem to be interested in my rants about education in Germany…at least the logfiles say so…so finally, here is another part of the „Dude, you bent my tower!“ series:

Alright, I did mention the PISA-shock in the first and second installment.
I also mentioned that they chose politicians to do the job…and as it is the case just about anywhere in the wold, politicians are usually one’s worst choice when it comes to actually solving a problem..and Germany was no different…

After Germany had recovered from the initial blow of „hero to zero in ten easy lessons“, they came up with a whole lot of bright ideas to save the day…they wanted to dominate…and history tells us that whenever Germany tries to dominate, things get ugly very quickly…
To understand why Germany is completely lost when it comes to things other than designing cars, brewing a decent beer and designing nuclear weapons, you must know the key feature of the German people: They’re whiny and impatient…

Whatever happens, it’s -thanks to the marvellous BILD newspaper- always a complete catastrophe and sure to be the knell for all mankind…you thought Woody Allen was depressed? You haven’t seen a German shortly after the reception of bad news then….and the usual reaction is: We demand our truste(e)d politicians (hey Gerhard, how are you getting on with your Russian lessons?) to change the world…within a second or two…

So here’s what German politicians sold as a „solution“

1. They started discussing whether it still made sense that rules and regulations regarding education were state law, not federal law

The idea of having each individual state take care of its schools all by itself might seem a good idea in a country the size of the USA…you can cross Germany north to south or east to west within a couple of hours….so it might not be such a great idea here…still, the bottom line was that education shall remain a matter of state law…
Some of the states, such as Bavaria and my current homestate North Rhine Westfalia have centralized examinations for the finals and interim evaluations (google „Lernstandserhebung“ if you happen to understand German), while other states do not….in those states every single school has a different final examination leading to the „Abitur“…
But not only that…Bavaria and NRW might have introduced centralized examinations….but do they have the very same ones? NOOO….of course not…that would have made too much sense…so even with centralized examinations, Bavaria still has standards different from NRW or other states….completely ridiculing the reason for having a centralized exam in the first place: standardization! Mind you, to get from my home to Bavaria I’d have to hit the Autobahn and drive for a measly four hours….
So, get this: Germany has standards for just about anything. There’s a shitload of DIN-norms….hell..I mean, there probably is a DIN telling you how to pee the proper German way…if I bought an M4 nut in Hamburg and an M4 bolt in Munich, I would trust my life on the fact they’d fit each other perfectly….but if a child from Bremen is -for whatever reason- forced to move to Duesseldorf, it will most likely have to redo a grade because the syllabus is different…how sick is that?

2. They cut the 13th year

They looked at those countries who had surpassed us in the PISA-evaluation and finally considered the thirteenth year in school unneccessary…
I agree..from a practical point of view the knowledge gained in the final year is less than useless…it belongs to the „nice to know“ category, but not knowing these things would hurt no one…especially when we consider the fact that universities retrain all necessary skills to homogenize the students, since they -as mentioned before- all have different levels of knowledge…
So, guess what they did? They cut the 13th year and let the children be? NOOOO….of course not….they DID cut the 13th year, but kept the syllabus!
Result: Even the eleven-year-olds now have to stay in school from daybreak until late afternoon….they kept the syllabus and crammed it into the remaining 12 years…
Well…that’s how it is in other countries you might say…but wait…there’s more ingenuity involved!

Yes, other countries such as Belgium always had their kids stay for much longer than the usual six periods formerly common in Germany…but…they were PREPARED for this…because there is one more thing children need besides love, liberty and Ritalin…children need FOOD every once in a while!
So, guess what just about any school in Germany DOESN’T have? …a canteen!

Okay…cliffhanger,…stay tuned!

cd