Education in Germany

Tradition and Reform in Historical Context

David Phillips

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN: 9781135096519
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

The German education and training system has been the subject of considerable attention from other nations, and has often been used as a model. David Phillips' book brings together articles from some of the best known names in the field including Mitter, Glowka, Hearnden, Fuhr, Robinsohn and Prais and wagner. The book is organised into four sections. Section one examines the historical inheritance of the present education system. Section two covers standards and assessments and section three discusses vocational education and training, and area of the German education system which has received much admiration. Finally, and crucially, section four addresses questions about the future of the current system in a unified Germany.

Part I

The forces of tradition

1	Two decades of non-reform in West German education [1967]
	†Saul Robinsohn and J. Caspar Kuhlmann

This chapter will limit itself to problems of the function and structure of primary and secondary education, for it is at the junction of primary and secondary education that the principal issues in national educational policy have arisen. Here is to be found the major dysfunctionality of certain educational systems, including the German – in the lag in training qualified personnel and in ‘democratizing’ education.¹

The title of this chapter demands some explanation. It is not meant to be polemic but to indicate that, in contrast to some other European countries, the adjustment of the educational system to the socio-economic and cultural developments of the mid-twentieth century has not yet really taken place in Germany. The authors do not consider certain changes in the organization of schooling and instruction which have occurred during the post-war years to have altered the system of West German education in any important degree. It is significant that a high official of the Bavarian Ministry of Education after enumerating a number of internal reforms, such as the participation of primary school teachers in deciding on selection for secondary schools, a concentration of subjects in the upper secondary schools, the introduction of social studies, the organization of study groups, and certain changes in the organization of the timetable, declared: ‘The secondary school has completed its reform’; and concluded: ‘peace must now return for a long period.’²

PATTERNS OF REFORM

The experience of total disruption after the Nazi period led many within the leading groups in Germany to look for security in old and trusted traditions. The conservatism which has prevailed in post-war Germany is a product of the overwhelming desire to recapture material well-being and social stability and a distrust of ‘new beginnings’ and experiments. Most of the leading university scholars rejected proposed reforms of the German secondary school and recommended retaining the traditional 9-year Gymnasium. Thus the Senate of the Hamburg University claimed in its memorandum of 1949 that ‘training and education for the highest degree of effectiveness is such an important and urgent political task for a democratic state that all other political considerations . . . are of no account, all the more so as any genuine education is in itself strong enough to avert the danger of unsocial isolation.’³ Thus, in a nutshell are summed up 150 years of idealistic traditions in education – a belief in a pre-stabilized harmony between educational and social freedom.

The early post-war years were marked by conflict between desire to restore the status quo before Hitler and the proposals of German reform groups and the ‘re-education’ policy of the occupying powers.⁴ In 1947, the Allied Control Commission had defined its concept of ‘democratizing’ education in a directive to the German ministers containing the following criteria: equality of educational opportunity; free tuition and teaching materials; an additional ninth year of obligatory schooling; education for international understanding; educational guidance; health supervision; academic training for all teachers; democratic school administration. Other points concerned curriculum and structure: ‘All schools should lay emphasis upon education for civic responsibility and a democratic way of life, by means of the content of the curriculum . . . and by the organization of the school itself’; and ‘schools for the period of compulsory education should form a comprehensive educational system. The terms “elementary education” and “secondary education” should mean two consecutive levels of instruction, not two types or qualities of instruction which overlap.’ This implied the introduction of a 6-year primary school and ‘organically integrated curricula of all schools to allow for later transfer.’⁵ Not that all these criteria were met by the educational systems of the occupying powers themselves, but they were supposed to indicate the general current of progressive education from which Germany had been excluded for the previous twelve years.

In the initial phase of the post-war period these principles were transformed into blueprints for reform in all Länder. They were, however, abandoned within the shortest span of time. Many points of the directive have never been implemented. Because of the unexpectedly speedy resumption of German independence and the quick realization of the futility of re-education dictated from outside, the allies stopped insisting on their implementation. The result was to discourage genuine German reform impulses. Cultural advisers contented themselves with the support of ‘internal reform,’ which was quite acceptable to their German counterparts and of course open to any number of interpretations.

If, in contrast to conditions after the First World War, there was no widespread and optimistic readiness for reform and innovation, actual needs were sooner or later bound to enforce change. Against these economic and social dynamics the opposition of conservative forces was all the more fierce.⁶ Within the strictly vertical school organization, reinforced by methods of strict selection and achievement control, the official representatives of the intermediate and secondary schools fought for the ‘Eigenständigkeit’ (distinctive task) of their institutions. We must not assume, however, that professional conservatism would have prevailed had there not existed a large measure of social support for it. When the sociologist Helmut Schelsky criticized the school for appropriating to itself the privilege of allocating social chances in a dirigiste manner, this was not said in criticism of the selective character of school organization.⁷ On the contrary, he intended to defend parents’ rights and, as witnessed by his criticism of the Rahmenplan (see below), to isolate this factor from its social context and to maintain the school, especially the secondary school, as a cultural preserve.⁸

In view of later developments it seems fair to say that things might have been different had not the ‘traditional remoteness of the state from a mode of thought which employs social categories,’ the lag of the social sciences in Germany caused by the Nazi period, and the ‘anti-sociological effect’ (as Hellmut Becker put it) retarded the application of social scientific methods to these problems.⁹ Eventually, surveys and interviews, the results of which have appeared recently,¹⁰ were to show that certain groups, notably industrial and agricultural laborers, were grossly under-represented in intermediate and secondary schools. If, on the surface, justification for this situation can be found in the low level of aspirations of the parents themselves, further analysis suggests that underneath this apparent acquiescence there is a distinctive recognition of the value of education and a corresponding feeling of frustration about the inability to attain it, which is widespread among educationally underprivileged groups. If we are to speak of a state of emergency in education, says W. Strzelewicz, ‘it is to be found in this realm of our socio-cultural situation,’ and he concludes that nearly every second adult in the Federal Republic lives with a feeling of not having had his chance.

To many it seemed the 1950s were the low tide of educational engagement and scholarship in post-war Germany. In 1956, a leading educationist wrote: ‘A general fatigue has fallen upon educational thought in Germany, and sluggishly, without any new impulses, pedagogy is dragging itself along.’¹¹ This was probably exaggerated, since, from its inauguration in September 1953 down to 1959, the Deutscher Ausschuß, was preparing its plan for a reorganization of German education. It was perhaps the tragedy of this commission and of its members that their work had to be done mainly in the setting of an older reform pedagogy and on the basis of personal experience and observation rather than on the much needed foundations of statistical survey, precise evidence, and systematic social analysis.

For it was the gradual maturing of such methods which marked the turning-point in the public treatment of educational problems. Surveys of manpower-demand, started by the Bavarian Kultusminister Rucker, paid increasing attention to the questions of academically trained manpower, of a growing teacher shortage, and of the amazing variance in the degree of schooling in the various Länder of the Federal Republic. The results of such surveys were summed up and spotlighted by Georg Picht, a philosopher and leading Kulturpolitiker, who declared the teacher shortage to be the signal of educational disaster. At about the same time Ralf Dahrendorf initiated and publicized further investigations into the problem of educational inequality, and a number of politicians introduced these issues into parliamentary debate.¹² Economics of education proved to be a most powerful lever. Friedrich Edding, its first and most prominent advocate in Germany, stated its importance in the following way: ‘A large part of public opinion in all countries is now convinced that educational attainment is not only an expression of material wealth, but that the future wealth of a country in any sense and its position in the world are strongly influenced by education.’¹³

It should be emphasized that this new approach was considerably influenced by the example of other western countries and by the activities of international organizations. This is especially true of the results of international economic surveys and analyses. The OECD Washington Conference of 1961 had demonstrated that West German schools lagged behind comparable countries in providing qualified manpower. Two years later the Conference of the Ministers of Culture initiated the first thorough survey of the demand for education. The Ministers of Education concluded that ‘German cultural policy, following a period of reconstruction, has now entered a new chapter in which parallel needs in all countries within modern industrial society give new and strong impulses to the further development of school and higher education policy.’¹⁴

There is no denying the vitalizing effect on German discussion of educational reform of economic and sociological investigation and international comparisons. But this wholehearted embracing of economic reasoning has no doubt created its own problems. There is not only the obvious difficulty of equivalence and comparability, but behind the outcry against what is being disparagingly called ‘Ökonomismus’ and ‘Soziologismus’ lies the understandable fear that quantitative approaches may conceal and even distort vital questions of function and quality. For example, a new government in Baden-Württemberg, upon taking office, defined the aims of its educational policy in predominantly economic terms, and the Minister of Education simply formulated his goals as: (1) a rise in the number of secondary school graduates to 15 per cent of the age group; and (2) a rise in the number of ‘intermediate’ graduates to 40 per cent.¹⁵ Detailed planning was initiated on this basis.¹⁶ One can hardly be surprised if such crude methods, apparently neglecting social and cu...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of illustrations
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Part I The forces of tradition
• Part II Standards and assessment
• Part III Vocational education and training
• Part IV Education in the New Germany
• Index