German schools

I made a reference the other day to students working on their university degrees until middle age. That was not entirely untrue. I felt like I'd maybe posted something about the school system before, so I started flipping through my old posts. Remember when I wrote about the old people in the swimming pool and my first Hannover Indians hockey game? Oh the memories. Anyway, I don't think I wrote about education before and if I can't remember then you can't either. Here we go.

The school system here is tough for foreigners to understand. It starts with Kindergarten, then Grundschule, which is elementary school. All the kids go to Grundschule until 4th grade. At that point the class splits up.

Kids who have the potential to go to university go on to Gymnasium. Unfortunately for them, it is not an all day PE class. It's more of a classic academic, college-prep experience. After 12th grade (used to be 13th), they take a big final exam and can go to university from there.

Then there's a group of 4th graders that goes to Hauptschule. Hauptschule is kind of like technical school. The students study there until 10th grade and then move on to more specific training in something like sales, secretarial skills, nursing, etc. That takes about 2 more years.

The last group of 4th graders goes to Realschule... as in real life school. They stay there until 10th grade and learn a trade, then do an apprenticeship or go to vocational school or just start working.

There's also a Gesamtschule, which combines all three. This sounds more like an American-style high school, where some classes have everyone together and some are advanced, regular, remedial, etc.

 For your enlightenment, I have included a diagram:

Got it? I hope so, because I am still a little confused.

I have mixed feelings about this system. How are you supposed to know when a kid is 10 years old whether he/she will be college material? What about the late bloomers? The kids with rough childhoods? The ones who eventually figure it out? In some states in Germany the parents make that decision. In others, the teachers decide. Then if the parents don't like the teacher's decision, they can try to get it changed but it takes a lot of work. Or they can send their kids to private school, if they have the money, that is.

This system serves the German economy very well. There are people trained for all sorts of jobs that need to be done. Students finish school with a marketable skill that they can use to get a job. That doesn't always happen for us liberal arts grads. And if you are smart and motivated, you can get a university education for free, or almost free. No student is prevented from going to college because they can't afford it, and they aren't burdened with tons of debt after graduation.

One thing this system does is maintains a social structure that makes me a little uncomfortable. You can pretty much tell by the time a kid is 12 years old what sort of socio-economic future he or she will have. They are even split up neatly into three categories. What about being an entrepreneur and pulling yourself up by those boot straps?... but wait, that's the American dream, not the German one. This is not a culture that praises a lot of risk-taking. There's a lot of stability in the way things work here, and I think the Germans like it that way.

The German school system is in the process of changing, or at least that's what I've heard. I am not sure what those changes will mean. If there is a school with all day PE class, though, I think a lot of kids will sign up for that.