A complete misinterpretation of the concept of equal opportunities led to lowering the requirements, thus turning the German school system into an ideological project.
There are many students with a migration background who fall below the average, but the German children are not the old ones anymore - a veteran teacher from North Rhine-Westphalia wrote about his experiences in Die Welt.
A retired German teacher - who worked as a teacher for four decades, including as a school principal - weighed in pessimistically in the columns of Die Welt
A teacher writing under the pseudonym Volker Müller reported that, according to his experience, the standard of German students has steadily deteriorated over the past forty years. Of course, there are still really good students, but this is not typical of school classes, he adds.
He recalled that when he started teaching, he still had expectations for his classes, but he was constantly forced to lower them because of "equal opportunities".
A complete misinterpretation of the concept of equal opportunity led to the fact that the requirements were simply lowered so that as many people as possible could get a high school diploma. He recalled that many children were sent to schools where they were simply not suitable. And this led to the fact that the standard had to be continuously lowered.
Volker also emphasized that the creation of "equality of opportunity" does not begin at school:
if someone does not receive proper education until the age of five or six, then there is no chance for them to catch up at school. For this reason, lowering expectations was not a good move either.
It doesn't help that universities are flooded with people who ultimately have no business there,
at the same time, no one wants to be a handyman. Children are also lulled into illusions that cannot come true. The tickets also contribute to this. Nowadays, there are high schools where 54 percent of the graduates have an average of five," he said. Today, parents often overestimate their children's abilities, he added. He also said that
during the decades, the social background of the students at the school was also completely transformed: while at the beginning of his career he taught mostly middle-class children, a few decades later he almost only met students from the lower classes with a migration background in his classes.
According to him, the German school system must be reformed, because in its current form it has turned into an ideological project.
Volker proposed that students be divided into classes according to their abilities, where everyone can receive the education that suits them, and also supports the introduction of university entrance exams.
Featured image: Quelle: Lars Fröhlich/imago
