Germany, comparisons, contrasts and surprises

Germany, comparisons, contrastsand surprises

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Comparisons, contrasts and surprises in Germany.

In June 2010 the following short article appeared in the magazine supplement of Germany’s premier weekly newspaper, Die Zeit1

“Life for these school children is going to be a great big show and they will be the candidates”

Harald Martenstein.

It’s been a long time since I have been in a primary school classroom. It must be ten years ago, when my son was in primary school. At that time Instruction was pretty much the same as I had experienced. A female teacher was doing the teaching and the children paid attention to her, in varying degrees.

On this occasion I was a reading monitor, meaning that I was helping with the learning of reading, on account of which activity I had to be present for two normal school lessons. These had as little to do with school, in the sense in which I understood it, as ancient Greek has to do with volleyball. Grades three, four, five and six were being taught at the same time, by two teachers, a man and a woman. There were children in the class who previously would have been in Special School but the Special School in Berlin has been abolished. Special pupils are now known by a different name, a long complicated name. “These children get an extra hour per week, “the teacher said.

“But that is a reduction,” I said.

“I think that too” the teacher replied.

The school was quite average, not a problem school. Almost all the pupils had perfect German.

At the start there was a long report from a fifth-grader on ancient Rome, the level of which seemed to me quite high. He spoke freely. I only gave papers in front of the class in the last stage of my grammar-school education since it took me years to bring my stage fright halfway under control. It is clear the next generation won’t have this problem. They learn early how to present themselves.

After the report there came comments, both positive and negative, from three fellow pupils in a quite professional manner: “It was good, in my view, that you didn’t have to read your talk and that you responded so spontaneously to questions”.

1 Die Zeit, June 10 Magazin p. 7.1


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After that pupils worked in groups or on their own, on various subjects, if that is still the appropriate term. The teachers would come around when a child became too loud and sit down and speak quietly to the child. The level of noise was so loud that I wouldn’t have beenable to concentrate. The teachers were rather more moderators or coaches than teachers inmy sense. Now and then they fetched themselves coffee from the coffee machine that was inthe room. Children sometimes got up and went into a neighbouring room to meet up with other children; some were chewing gum; one of them was eating. All this went unremarked.

There was a lot that I found good, other things not. Discipline, concentration and self-control, in contrast to earlier times, played no role. I am nevertheless fairly sure that such things have real value in life. Some learning did however take place. It struck me that, putting aside the terrible noise, this particular class recalled the “Little Schools” which we used to have and which were generally considered to be very bad. Now, after twenty years, we are perhaps going back in the other direction. They call it progress, I call it fashion. We put a pile of money into changing the system while school buildings are crumbling and the classes are not getting any smaller. In my opinion improvements in school quality would domore good than changing the system.

But I thought to myself, perhaps there is arising a new type of human being, self-confident and extrovert, easy to distract, somewhat lacking in concentration. For these new people lifewill be a big show and they will be the participants.

Some of our problems they won’t have so they will have different ones. At the end of the lesson the teacher put a karaoke CD on and the class sang, word-perfectly, Satellite, the hit song from Eurovision for 2010 by Germany’s winner, Lena.

This short article represents what might be taken as the perspectiveof the “man-in-the-street” upon education as it happens in most schools in the West. It provides a sharp contrast to the picture of education as it used to occur in the other Germany, the GDR, and to some extent apparently still does happen in the East. Germany is oneof the heartlands of the progressive view of education and the GDR was a bastion of traditional education. The contrast between the twoapproaches has been the cause of some soul-searching in the circles that concern themselves with education in Germany. Blogs2 (such as

2 War damals in der DDR wirklich alles schlechter? Die Welt 28 December and Was war in der DDR besser damals, als es Heute in der BRD ist ? http://gutefrage.net/frage/was-war-in-der-ddr-besser-damals=al...09/07/2007 Die lehrmethoden der ehemaligen DDR waren besser 09/12/2010 http://www.gutefrage.net/frage/die-lernmethoden-der -ehemaligen-ddr-waren-besser-

2

http://gutefrage.net/frage/was-war-in-der-ddr-besser-damals=al...09/07/2007

http://gutefrage.net/frage/was-war-in-der-ddr-besser-damals=al...09/07/2007


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that of,) have permitted residents of the Eastern part of Germany todebate over the internet the virtues and vices of the socialist vision of schooling in the old DDR or Deutsche Demokratische Republik. The PISA and other international tests and comparisons tend to suggest that the educational standards of the East were morerigorous than those of the West. I will explore this issue as just one of several that highlight Germany as an almost model example of the Western conceptualisation of education as an industry, as a formof consumer good and as a theatre of social conflict. All of these angles on education can be seen explored in the eminent German newspaper/magazine Die Zeit. In one issue in June 2010 in an articleentitled “Which school is the best ?” it covered the thorny questionfor parents of the type of school, Gesamtschule, Hauptschule, Realschule, Gymnasium or some kind of private to which school they should to send their children. In another article, the leading educational historian, Heinz-Elmar Tenorth, explained why this is a particularly German problem (that education is what the middle classes see as their property and they don’t want to share it). In athird article the multicultural question was broached with a Turkishfamily which was bucking the trend and having success with their daughter.

The aspect of education as a theatre of political conflict was covered by Die Zeit in an article in a commemoration of the reunification of Germany 20 years after the fall of the Wall3. This article which effectively produced a comparison between two contrasting approaches: that of the all-powerful state, the GDR, exercising responsibilities to all its subjects on condition that they accept its close tutelage and ideology, and the freer but less responsible Western state, treating its subjects, primarily, as consumers. Although the heading of the article and the summation at the end of it suggested that the demise of the socialist unitary school system and the transformation of Eastern German schools into parts of the complex German hierarchical system had been good and necessary the article was balanced and informative and leaves the impression that a melding of the two systems rather than an absorption of the one by the other might have been a better choice to make in 1990 and 1991.

3 Otto, Jeannette. Nicht zu retten. Die Zeit 5 November 2009 p. 46 Chancen3


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But this soul-searching about school systems is only one of three main problems that pedagogy confronts in Germany. This country provides an exemplar or template of the problems with which pedagogydeals without looking at what education really is. To expand on whatI have asserted before, I claim that Pedagogy tackles education as any one of three things at any one time: it is an industry or production systems for the provision of certain goods, namely “educational services”; it is the consumption by the putative “consumers” of these goods, products or services seen as a form of capital or investment; and thirdly it is an arena of social disputation or action in pursuit of certain goals, principally on the part of the “Social partners” of Labour and Capital who pursue sometimes conflicting, sometimes complementary goals. For industry or commerce it is training to intensify productivity; for social agents claiming to speak for Labour, such as socialist parties, progressive intellectuals and the workers’ movement it is action in pursuit of social equality. It is this latter type of interest thatmotivates the focus upon the system differences that are brought outby comparing the GDR system of education with the West German one. However the two other types of concern with education as an industrial activity contributing to the economy and as a set of consumer articles are also highlighted by the attention paid to the education system which used to prevail in the failed state of East Germany. Was the GDR system more efficient at producing knowledgeable and productive citizens? Did it satisfy the East Germans as consumers? Did it benefit one social class as against another?

The problem is clearly set at the outset of the article: “When the Wall fell twenty years ago, nobody regretted the passing of the German Democratic Republican School. Today some are asking if it wasdisposed of too quickly”4 The article then moves into the mixed narration /description of the model/horror school run as a sort of living museum by one Elke Urban who performs lessons with prepared tourists (adolescents in this account) so as to demonstrate the nature of an authoritarian school in an authoritarian state. Some visitors, particularly former GDR teachers, question whether the class management was as ideological and brutal as Ms. Urban makes it

4 Otto, J. p.464


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seem. She puts this down to Ostalgie, fond recollections of the past which have filtered out the nastiness.

Ms. Otto enumerates the vices of the GDR School in her third paragraph: by the dishonesty of its citizenship education, the weapons handling and civil defense and the increasing militarizationof the whole of school life (flag roll-calls, Pioneer manoeuvres, long-distance throwing of imitation grenades) the system discrediteditself.

“The state could impede and sanction whomever and whenever it wished. Just a political joke, too much contact with the Western relatives, could debar access to the Abitur. With an Abitur frozen at 12 per cent, established according to the requirements of the People’s economy, the GDR had reached the level of a developing economy.”

So when Easterners with ambition got their chance they embraced the change to the (Western) tripartite system because access to the top-level school type, the Gymnasium, afforded access to the university or other higher-learning institution. And absorption into West Germany meant a peaceful transition whereas arguing over reform of East German institutions and transforming them so as to retain some of their genuine socialist character would have led to conflict. As Jan-Hendrik Olbertz, himself an Easterner and Minister for Culture in Saxony-Anhalt, Otto reports as affirming, a backward glance couldnot be afforded; a clean break had to be made. But now (in 2009) “we should have the self-assurance to value the things that the GDR School did well since at the time of the reunification some things were too quickly thrown out”5.

Here the article enumerates the good features of the GDR School:

In the polytechnic upper school all students, of whatever social background, however gifted or ordinary they were, studied together for eight years, and in the last years of theGDR for ten years.

Throughout the country of East Germany the lesson plans, textbooks and exams were the same, thus unified curriculum andunified certificates

5 ibid5


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It was seen as absolutely natural for everyone, girls and boysalike, to study scientific subjects without their having a stigma of difficulty

No child to be left behind was the ruling pedagogical principle so that apparently the most gifted students could be motivated without taking one’s eyes off the weak students6.

Jeannette Otto considers next the ambivalent virtues: the subject “Productive Work” which connected school and work life but which could be a waste of time due to poor organisation, a phenomenon which plagued life in the command economy. And the “God-Parent brigades, or the Harvest Deployments.

Or the special schools devoted to languages, mathematics and science or sport which hand-picked children who had been tracked down by talent scouts were drilled? Or should we reflect upon the after-school and holiday care, affordable ‘school provisioning’, homework help or house visits into the homes of their pupils by teachers?7

However everything in East Germany, including the schools, was subject to political influence, interference, supervision in the pursuit of a society made up of “socialist men and women”. So as oneof the contributors to the PISA process as a leading educationist inGermany, Juergen Baumert put it: “The GDR school could not be saved”8

Even the positive aspects which can be found in these schools were linked to the political system. Both school life and life outside of school were kept in harmony with the Party line. With the disintegration ofthe political system all the virtues of the GDR School became invalid.

But as the article goes on to suggest, the alternative educational ideas represented by the POS in the East-- i.e. all-day schooling, abolition of school and in-class streaming, improvement in the teaching of science and mathematics-- the communist version of the Einheitsschule which walks like a ghost through German history, continue to haunt German state governments shocked by poor results revealed in the PISA tests and a huge drop-out rate and low levels of literacy in a large part of the youth population.

6 ibid

7 ibid

8 ibid6


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An education researcher in Dortmund, Hans-Günter Rolf, wonders what results might have shown up if the two systems had been allowed to run in parallel9. Sweden, he says, had tried this in the fifties and had concluded in favour of the comprehensive school, similar to the Einheitsschule and a more complete realisation of the idea of the Gesamtschule of German experience. But as Jeannette Otto says inthis article:

But at the beginning of the nineties the formulators of educational policy found no reason to envy the Swedish experience. Similarly, no-one knew anything about the report of success from Finland’s comprehensive school, which had originally drawn its inspiration from the school system of the GDR. The rude awakening from our own self-sufficiency was only brought by the TIMMS and PISA comparisons of performance years later10.

Jeannette Otto continues to explain the advantages of the Eastern system which produced better results in the Eastern states in mathematical and scientific subjects than students of the same age in any Western state such as Nordrhein-Westfalen.

It stood out that in the East there were fewer poor students in the lower ranks of performers and the fostering of the weak students did not occur at the expense of performance peaks. “Thereby, for us, the principle: ‘none to be left behind’ in the GDR was confirmed as something actualized in real life” says Olaf Keller, director at the institute for the Pedagogy of Natural Science in Kiel.

Only when in the last year the Saxon students emerged the unexpected winners in the PISA country comparison and after the results of Iglu-primary school study were calculated and caused celebrations for the children of Thuringia shown as the best readers in the country; only then did Germany ask herself: just how did the East do it?

Ms Otto allows herself to speculate on the reasons for this success:

The secret recipe of the new educational elite turned out to be a simple mixture of tradition and renewal. The eastern German states have preserved for themselves much of what once was typical of the GDR school. The principle of performance is still here valued. Discipline is still valued. Weak students are given the help that they need. Eighty per cent of the Saxon teachers still have classical Eastern biographies, bear the stamp of the polytechnische Oberschule and the teacher training of the GDR. They have never put aside their sense of responsibility for every single pupil. They hardly knew where to begin with the West German debates about insufficiently supportive home backgrounds and the delayed separation from ‘the cuddly pedagogy’ (presumably a reference to primary school or to primary school ‘fun’ pedagogy) which remained foreign to them11.

9 Otto, J. Die Zeit Chancen Schule, p. 76

10 Ibid. p 76.7


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And in Saxony, she reports, as do later journalists, the scientific subjects play a greater role than in any other German state. Five special schools are given over to mathematical and scientific extension so as to guarantee the role of Engineer factory of Germany to that particular state.

Of course the article concludes by pointing out that as a command economy under political direction East Germany made noeffort to provide open access to higher education to all layers of society but only those hand-picked by the Party always anxious to preserve its hold on society. In the early stages of the socialist republic (in 1954 for instance) a majority of those involved in higher studies came from working-class or peasant families (54%) but by 1989 this had fallen to 10% because the Party considered that its élite-building was complete. By this time the GDR had become, as theTrotskyists say, a “degenerate workers’ state”. In other wordsthe construction of a society of full equality and opportunitywas no longer on the agenda so that the GDR was a democratic socialist society in name only. The downfall of the GDR began with internal dissatisfaction and attempts at radical reform. But impatience led to adoption of the alternative for the whole nation of that model which had always been available forindividuals of sufficient daring, namely capitalist Germany. The people of East Germany implemented their frustration with “real-existing socialism” by using their feet. In this we see a criticism of the GDR system not only from a democratic perspective but from the consumerist perspective that accompanies the Western conception of democracy. The GDR system failed to adequately fulfil the requirements of a component part of a modern society of consumption, to make available the typical articles and services of a modern industrial society and that is perhaps the primary reason why it failed. The general public of the DDR was not as much dissatisfied with its very conservative education system as it

11 Ibid p. 768


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was frustrated with its limitations on equality of opportunity, i.e. the restrictions it placed on the “consumption” of more education.

About 75% of the graduates of Year Ten went into vocational training, up to 5% gained a double qualification of vocational education plus Abitur through a three-year course and fewer than 10% entered into the EOS (higher or Senior secondary College), the two-year Abitur preparation course.Only two years later, i.e. by the school year 1991/92 more than 30% of students finishing primary schoolwere going into the Gymnasium. The share of students in the Year 11 level of a “Gymnasial” senior level is in some of the new states higher than 40%12)

Reh and Tillmann go on to point out:

While it took more than 30 years in the old states of the Federal Republic (from 1955 to 1989) to raise the proportion of secondary students in the Gymnasia or “gymnasial” courses to double from 15% to 30%, this change occurred in the former DDR over a period of about 2 to 3 years. (ibid p.229)

It would not be unreasonable to interpret this phenomenon as an endorsement of education and a hunger for more of it (and its benefits) rather than a disgust with it as is so evident amongst swathes of the youth population in the West.

Discomfort in the Western parts of Germany about the strengthsthat the East enjoyed had begun to develop fairly soon after the Wall came down but the perplexity produced by the confusion of both positive and negative elements portrayed in the article “Nicht zu retten” (Not to be saved) might have been a little less if attention had been paid to the phenomenon depicted in an article in the same paper only a month before the commemorative article. In “The Vietnamese Wonder” by Martin Spiewak the remarkable success of the children of former contract workers in the GDR was explored and attempts made to understand this contradiction of the customary thesis that migrant background equals educational disadvantage. These students had been taught by teachers trained under the GDR system and retained in the new schools instituted after the fall of the wall. A study devoted to any12 (Reh, Sabine and Tillmann, Klaus-Jűrgen, Zwischen Verunsicherung und Stabilitäts-Suche Die Deutsche Schule, 86. Jg. 1994 H.2 pp. 228

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group of students in the East was unavoidably a study of students educated in the mixture of break and continuity that the school systems of the new federal republics represented. Such students were thus the product of a post-communist East Germany, not of West Germany. And as Sabine Reh and Klaus-Jűrgen Tillmann pointed out in their study of student experience of the change, for them: “Basically nothing had changed: the teaching was the same, the teachers were the same, only the books were new” And this continuity of teachingstyle has been observed for well over a decade after the fall of the Wall. Attempts were made to make over the teaching work-force to Western models which lessened the authority of the teachers and attempted to subordinate them to parents and students but after a few years of disturbance things seem to have returned to normal, or if you are an advocate of the individualistic child-centred Western model of pedagogy, the authoritarian style has reasserted itself. Whatever way one thinks of it, the successes of any groups of students in the East raise questions about what learning and education are andhow they best proceed.

Work in this area of Vietnamese students had been begun by an integration worker in Brandenburg, Karin Weiss13, who had put together a set of essays on the theme of the great success in integration and education of the Vietnamese of Eastern Germany. However because this group was a quite small one it continued to be disregarded as an aberration from the usual rule that migrant-background groups in German (and other Western) society could not achieve educational equity with thedominant ‘native’ ethnic group because of the linguistic, monetary and cultural deficits that they suffer in comparison to those who have all three forms of capital required for social advancement. The perplexity of Pedagogy in the face of this aberration is due, in my view, to its determination to

13 Schűle, A. K. Weiss u.a. (Hgg.): Erfolg in der Nische? H-Net Reviews in the Humanities and Social Sciences.

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frame education, not as self-directed purposeful activity, butonly as a component part of industry organised by the state for its own economic and political objectives (which it partlyis). Educational sociology is held to contribute to this larger process by elaborating the theory by the aid of which new elements of society may be incorporated into the workings of both civil society and the economy. The Vietnamese did not seem to confirm conventional educational sociology.

Karin Weiss questioned this prejudice in a seminar devoted to immigration and integration in the East held in Potsdam in 200514. She pointed out in an interview with Marina Mai of the local Berlin paper, the Tageszeitung15 that poor education for immigrants was a western problem that did not apply to the East. There, extreme right-wing youth were the problem, not disaffected migrants. Regarding Vietnamese students she complained that in the PISA studies their educational successes were underestimated because theyare too few to come into PISA’s category of migrant-background but that when all of them in all five eastern states, even leaving out Berlin, they amount to 20,000 children.

She reported in the interview that there were more matriculants (with the Abitur or university-qualifying certificate) amongst students of migrant background and fewer Special schools for weak students than in the Western states. The best state was her own, Brandenburg, with 44% of all foreign-background youth leaving schoolwith the esteemed Abitur, thus having more migrants qualified with that qualification than native-born Germans.

Karin Weiss conceded that there were fewer migrants overall for Eastern schools to deal with but asserted that they catered better for those that they had in any case, with kindergartens everywhere used by almost everybody so that children learnt German and the German culture outside of the home. The decline in the population ofthe East also contributed favourably to educational outcomes because

14 Zuwanderung und Integration in den neuen Bundesländer

15 Mai, M. Vietnamesen Kinder besonders schlau, taz.de 06/12/2005 accessed 07/-2/2015 http

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schools were prepared to work hard with their struggling students soas not to be closed down. This compared unfavourably with the West where many schools in the big cities were bursting at the seams.

In considering the different sorts of cultural backgrounds of immigrant groups in the East as compared to the West she admitted the value of the cultural capital brought by Jewish immigrants out of the former Soviet bloc. But as to the Asian background immigrants, the Chinese and Vietnamese the essential thing that theybring to school is educational ambition derived from respect for learning. Amongst them, she said, there was no “drop-out” or “slacker” culture. Materially the immigrants in the East were just as poor as those in the West.

Asked if she thought the media-created image of migrant-background kids as being slow learners and inclined to violence was a problem, she said that it was, if it led schools to put students down a year because their German was weak. It was wrong to disregard their levels of knowledge and skills in particular areas such as mathematics or science. Students out of Asia or Russia usually knew more in these subjects than their German coevals so putting them down a year was de-motivating for them

Finally Karin Weiss emphasised that it was a pedagogical problem forschools to work out how to help students out of disadvantaged backgrounds, whatever the nature of this background, to do their best. Whether they were extreme-rightists (or new Nazis) or children and young people out of migrant homes the schools were obliged to deal with their problems and not push them away as Herr Stoiber, the author of the racist book advocating the expulsion of immigrants, wanted to do.

Ralph Hartmann16 represents another voice of critique of the (West) German education system influenced by the past of the Eastern states. Ex-communists or other left-wing sympathisers are invalidated from defending the GDR as a whole because of its totalitarian nature. Its extensive system of delation and spying undermined any moral authority it may have had from its apparent commitment to egalitarian values. So those who would seek to 16 Hartmann, R. DDR-Angebot fűr Annette Schavan. P 1- 5 Ossietzky Zweiwochenschrift fűr Politik/Kultur/Wirtschaft No. 5 2007

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criticise the clearly elitist and inegalitarian school system long entrenched in Germany have to concentrate exclusively upon the West’s tripartite school system which discriminates, if not overtly,then at least in its effects, against the lower classes and compare this system with the unitary school of the old GDR. A common stratagem has been to hitch the GDR school to the rising star in educational circles, the Finnish peruskoulu or comprehensive school.

German glances are turned for help to Finland, the undisputed winner in the PISA stakes, a country whose

school system is built on the comprehensive school. In recent years ministers and education experts have been

travelling to the land of the thousand lakes in order to study the Finnish school marvel. But why go so far from

home?

Hartmann takes as evidence for a strong East German influence upon

Finland two pieces of hearsay evidence that cannot be easily

confirmed given that Finnish educators have no particular reason to

enter into German educational debates.

Hartmann adds few extra points to what was said in the “Not to be saved article” but it is interesting that he is able to quote a minister of Education, Frau Bulmahn, conceding that an opportunity was missed during the reunification “to ask critically what were theachievements of the GDR education system which we should retain”17. She went on:

“For example the close cooperation between kindergarten and primary school was certainly an achievement that should have been retained in the new states and which also could have been adopted in the old federal states, I am sure of that. Or for example a more strongly practice-orientated in-serviceteacher training”18

Hartmann provides figures for the use of pre-school services. Ninety-six per cent of parents in the GDR used this facility; in crèches for children up to three years of age the demand could not be met and only 80% were covered19. Since then, in integrated 17 Ibid. p. 3

18 Ibid. p. 3

19 Ibid. p.413


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Germany, it has fallen to 40% but this is way above the low percentages in all Western states where feminists are still campaigning against the old post-war assumption that men would go towork and their wives would be at home to look after the children, both before school, and after, at about 1:30 when they came home from a morning’s schooling. Hartman also makes the point that attendance at kindergarten was free and the children’s lunch only cost 35 pennies while day-long care was charged to parents at 27.5 marks per month instead of a real cost of 177 marks. All of this support contributed to the integration of children of migrant background and the Vietnamese made the greatest use of it all.

Meanwhile in the West the rift between socialist conceptions of education and “Christian” or conservative ones maintained the education system in a form which continued the traditions of the nineteenth century in which the “orders” received the education appropriate to their future status in society: Gymnasium for those who were to rule, Realschule for those were to carry out commerce and technical work (alongside some vocational schooling in Berufschulen and workplaces) and Volksschule, later, Hauptschulen for the masses. Die Zeit recorded the defeat of attempts to change this situation begun in the sixties in an article entitled “Thirty Years Stasis” by Benjamin Seifert dated the 28th of July 2010.

Fear in the face of the “unity school (Einheitsschule)” and “ideological experiments” unites the German educational elites. It is remarkable however, how still today the same arguments and slogans are being used as they were 30 years ago. At that time a referendum to be conducted by the North Rhine Westphalia government brought down school reform plans even before the vote. What followed was a decades-long stagnation in German educational policy.20

The principal change which the Social Liberal government of North-Rhine Westphalia was trying to introduce then was one that was againan issue in Hamburg in the years 2009 2012, namely the extension of the primary years from four to six so that working-class, single-parent and migrant families would have more time for their children to catch up to the middle-class, double-parent, professional German families. This impulse towards was more social equity was led by

20 Seifert, B. Dreissig Jahre Stillstand. Zeit Online schule14


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Willi Brandt and supported by the SPD state governments or parties but largely without success. As Seifert says:

. The representatives of the foreign language teachers and of the parent associations saw in the planned reform the end of the independence of the grammar school (Gymnasium) and of the freedom of the child him or herself to determine his own educational course of study. The CDU objected to the government that it wanted quite secretly to introduce the “socialist Einheitsschule” into the Federal Republic of Germany.

Before the law introducing the comprehensive school trials was passed by the state parliament in October 1977 a broad front composed of various interest groups called the citizens action referendum against the cooperative school was organised. With massive support from the CDU Opposition and the Catholic Church there began a fierce argument with the advocates of the reform. And it succeeded21.

But this was not the first time that the Social-Democratic or Socialist educational reformers were defeated by the conservatives who opposed the possible dilution of the opportunities of the middleclasses to ensure that their offspring inherited their social status. Just as the ‘progressives’ or socialists believed that the social environment of children from ‘better’ homes could help the children of the working classes and the disadvantaged layers of society, so also the upper and middle classes, or their representatives, so to speak, (i.e. the grammar school teachers, particularly foreign-language teachers, CDU party members and many clergy) believed that any advantages gained by lower-class less culturally-endowed children could only be produced at the expense ofthe more school-disposed children. This happened in Berlin in 194722 and in Bremen in 194823. Of course teachers who had high academic expectations found it easier and more agreeable to teach middle-class kids than those from relatively culturally deprived backgrounds. Thus the teachers of Greek, Latin and other foreign languages, those known in Germany as “Philologen”, were particularlyhostile to any reduction in the numbers of years and hours availableto them to teach their language courses in the Gymnasia and they found ready allies in the Christian Democratic Union which

21 Ibid.

22 Klewitz, M. Berliner Einheitsschule 1945 -1951

23 Bundesländer Schulreform Keine experimente Der Spiegel Nr 38/1960 pp. 35 - 39

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considered any kind of comprehensive school or integration of different sorts of schools or courses into the one school to be just“the thin edge of the wedge”. This battle had been fought in Schleswig-Holstein in the forties, and fifties24, just as it had beenin Berlin, Bremen and Hamburg in the forties. In each case victory remained with the conservatives.

What is remarkable about this phenomenon is that it shows the hold that unexplored, untested ideas can have upon sections of the population. It shows too the continuity of fixed prejudices in social groups. It is understandable that parents fear the influence of children upon each other; parents who take their responsibilitiesseriously will always be anxious lest the good influence that they strive to exercise upon their offspring might be undermined by theirchildren “falling into bad company”. It is another thing for professional educators to endorse this fear by despairing of the capacity of children to sensibly choose to model their behaviour andscholarly habits upon good students rather than weak ones. This is, in other words, another manifestation of the idea of the teaching bythe environment. The social context of a school is certainly important and schools that aim to do well always strive to set a tone in which order, discipline, good manners, respect for knowledgeand diligence and consistency are the principles upon which the school operates. However the German parents and teachers who foughtto keep the working-class children away from those of the professionals, academics or civil servants were over-anxious to preserve the privilege that they enjoyed in having their children schooled in the Gymnasia and they were effectively discriminating against the bulk of the population in order to do this. They were also contradicting the principle of equality of opportunity and freedom of choice of individual students by forcing children, parents and teachers to choose for children aged 10 after 4 years ofprimary schooling the school in which they were to complete their education. They were thereby anticipating the intellectual development of those children and effectively assigning them to the social-educational environment that society had laid down for them in their socio-economic background. It is however only in this prematurity of choice that educational sociologists tend to disagreewith upper-class and middle-class parents. The theories about socio-24 ibid

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economic determination of school careers propounded by academic teacher educators that are built around the work of Coleman and Bourdieu are only a pessimistic refinement of the prejudices of the philologen and their parent supporters around the Gymnasium.

Current debates in Germany about the need to reconsider the virtues of the GDR system can also be seen as an expression of the context theory of education. The socialists and communists who fought for the Einheitsschule in Berlin and elsewhere in Germany after the Second World War did so in the belief that the upper classes had no right to withhold the benefits of their cultural capital from being sharedwith the lower classes and they found some allies in parts of other classes who felt that a greater community spirit would be achieved by the mixing of the classes in the schools:

Like all the social-democratic led governments after the war the Minister (for Education) of the state of Schleswig-Holstein had shown himself open to the thought of a general reform of schools and gave shape to the reform plans of a few experienced school men in Preetz. They established in the community of 12,500 residents an experimental school for the government in Kiel: the People’s Upper School (VOS)25.

With this Volksoberschule, which began its existence in October 1948, a school type which had never before existed in Germany: under its motto, One People, One School, One Body of Teachers, the school reformers of Preetz brought together Volksschueler (continuing central school students), Mittelschuler (commerce-inclined middle-ranking students) and Gymnasiasten (academically inclined able students) in the same school premises.

“The bringing together of the three school kinds”, the leader of the People’s Upper School, Senior StudiesDirector, Dr Schnauer explains, “ finds its meaning in the recognition of the need for community and for a fairer promotion of students in the context of this community.”26

Ultimately the socialists and community-minded reformers lost out tothe Christian Democrat conservatives in almost all the German statesof the West and the socialist idea of a unitary, comprehensive or common school for all was only implemented in the East. But with Germany’s poor showing in the international comparison tests begun at the end of the nineties the advocates of the Einheitsschule came outof the woodwork and argued for the virtues of that school type,

25 ibid

26 Ibid. 17


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primarily arguing on the basis of social context but mixing into their case the more soundly educational points, such as the early education system of the GDR, as mentioned previously27.

The claim made by Hartmann and others for some time to the idea thatFinland must have, or did in fact, “borrow” its education system from East Germany is a reflection of three or four possible influences: German nationalism, Eastern resentment towards their Western brothers, lingering socialist or communist sympathies or Ostalgie towards the failed German state and an obsession with “structure”. This fourth I will deal with after clearing up the question of the relation between the two educational models: the East German and the Finnish one. Did Finland copy East Germany?

This question was made the topic of a seminar held in the Faculty ofEducational Sciences at the University of Dresden in October 2009 byDr Cornelia Klink28. The introduction justifies the topic by referring to the frequently heard claim which has already been mentioned above that Jeannette Otto seems to accept: “The Finns havesimply taken over the good GDR system” Such or similar, it is suggested, is the thesis that many have heard.

The actual likelihood that Finland deliberately copied the GDR system is dealt with quite briefly. Research in the archives of both Finland and the GDR did not provide definitive evidence that Finland learnt primarily from East Germany; evidence for a strong influence is secondary, mainly anecdotal and thus not conclusive. The reason that a borrowing might be supposed is the relatively tight superficial symmetry between the two systems. Thus the assertion that Finland copied the GDR is another reflection of the

27 Hartmann Ossietzky in May 2007

28 Klinck, C. and Lang, S. Seminararbeit. Thema: Vergleich der Bildungssystem Finnlands und der DDR. Fragestellung: Hat Finnland tatsächlich das Bildungssystem der DDR űbernommen? Downloaded from data6.blog.de/media/589/4049589_29c3fd2d80_d.pdf

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attention paid by German pedagogues to structure. If presented in diagrammatic form the two systems seem remarkably similar, with nearuniversal pre-school education, a comprehensive or unitary school covering the ages 6/7 to 15/16, a further academic school leading onto university entrance alongside vocational education which might lead to an alternative form of tertiary qualification.

A comparison which stays at the structural level misses some value differences but also some similarities in values. And there are somesimilarities at the level of values. Precisely the most important principle, namely equality of opportunity is found reflected in the GDR (up to a point). However this principle was vitiated by the application of rider clauses which moderated the free exercise of talent. “Although indeed the constitution of the GDR guaranteed equal opportunity to all citizens of the country in fact discrimination and politically motivated exclusion occurred towards people who themselves or whose parents did not behave in line with socialist values or who were not committed to them.”29. A second important value implemented in the GDR alike as in Finland was freedom from expenses for those being educated. However since the GDR restricted the progress of the great majority on to tertiary study, while Finland allows through its exam system about 53% to go on to university, the similarity between the two systems rests mainly in the treatment of pre-school education. In both systems 95% of parents used kindergartens for their children at virtually nocost. The GDR system also provided child care from the age of threeweeks to three years, provided as a right, either municipally or by the workplace and this was used by 80% of parents.

Another value or principle can be seen as shared by the two systems:“both states combined their efforts so as to leave behind the fewestpossible students.”30 Ms. Klink has to observe however that this value took on a political value in the struggling socialist state, 29 Klinck & Lang op. Cit. p. 16

30 Ibid p. 2019


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so in this area too, comparison has to look beneath the surface. “While in Finland this massive supportive effort is principally directed to the welfare of students, in the GDR the image of those who failed did not fit into the conception of the sacred socialist state for the leadership. For that reason statistical reports were modified before public release or students were promoted against reservations.31” Margot Honecker, the minister for education, repeated Walter Ulbricht’s mantra: “Every physically and mentally normal child completes Year Ten”. This tendency towards the fudging of results so as to delude the general public is, of course, not confined to the failed German state of the eighties. The state of Victoria in Australia deliberately watered down the requirements of its matriculation certificate in the early nineties and raised the pass rate from about 63% to just over 80% so that virtually all students who attend school for 12 years receive a certificate that treats them ostensibly as educated people. In East Germany the approach to achieving excellent results was similar to that used throughout Victoria before and to a lesser extent after the reform of the early nineties, namely discouragement or expulsion of students who were not coping before the age of fourteen or fifteen. In Victoria, Australia, students who are not achieving basic literacy and therefore cannot cope with secondary school are moved from school to school until they reach the minimum school-leaving age or drop out of the system voluntarily. Some manage to secure places in the very few “community” schools for students with learning difficulties.

Both the Finnish education system does, and the East German one, did, use centralised curricula leading to an externally organised final matriculation exam which was necessarily the same across the whole country. Curriculum was always tightly specified in the GDR atall levels but in Finland there have been periods in which much moreambit was allowed to municipalities to adapt the curriculum to localconditions although there was ultimately a return to more 31 ibid

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centralisation because it was desired that students be able to move around the country without educational disadvantage or confusion. This problem besets federated countries like Germany, the United States and Australia

Undoubtedly one of the reasons that the media in Germany have been paying more attention to claims of virtues in the GDR system is thatafter Germany was re-united they had to win over as many as possiblenew readers and listeners amongst the former citizens of the GDR. Many of these would be those who had benefited from the clearly elitist education system of the GDR and inclined therefore to see itin a positive light. Amongst such “ostalgic” citizens anecdotal evidence of the interest of Finnish educators and policy-makers in GDR schooling readily circulated. But the important similarity that I wish to underline is not the structural one discussed above but rather what might be better considered as one of conception of role.As Ms. Klink pointed out:

The high degree of similarities arises naturally from the similar preconditions for the successful survival

of the two states. Both countries had few raw materials and in industry were correspondingly turning

their attention to a high level of trained workers in order to achieve at least a qualitative leap ahead

intellectually32.

This meant that the SED government of East Germany did seriously want to educate its people to be more productive through intellectual excellence, not merely to indoctrinate them. It was not as (ostensibly) ambitious as contemporary governments are with respect to education’s contribution to the economy and it exercised tight political control over higher education, not merely for ideological reasons, but also so as not to waste resources on peoplewho would take their qualifications to the West with them. But the kind of schooling that it provided was more in harmony with that of the East in general, i.e. the Far East as well as the rest of the Soviet bloc, in so far as it was traditional i.e. teacher managed orin the terms that “progressive” pedagogues use, “teacher-dominated”.

32 Ibid. p.1821


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In 2.004, N-Tv published an account of the GDR Enheitsschule 33which wasthe forerunner of increasingly bold mentions, in the media and on the internet, of the dreaded word: “Einheitsschule” It claimed that numerous Finnish politicians and teachers made trips to the DDR to find ideas with which to shake up their own education system. Sincein the early sixties there were communists in the government of Finland this is not completely implausible. But what is most interesting in this article is the outright statement that an authoritarian style of teaching in important areas is more effectivethan the supposedly ‘democratic’ disorder that is described at the outset of this chapter:

The education of citizens into responsible citizens is not compatible with a repressive pedagogy—a goodresult in a PISA mathematics test is however quite so. Students in Korea and Japan, who rank particularly high in the PISA winner ranks, work under considerable pressure in the course of instruction. In this regard the GDR system and its control mechanisms didn’t only work very efficiently inschool. Without almost complete occupation of their time, strict dealing with students’ rights and responsibilities and homogeneous learning groups considerable and also speedy successes in educationwould not have been conceivable.

According to this report all students were taught the same thing (incontrast to the common idea of core and electives). Only in Year Seven could a second foreign language be added as an elective. Students were taught in class groupings. The subject matter was strictly laid down with lesson plans and text books uniform across the country. Instruction went on from Monday through into Saturday.Marks were given for Behaviour, Cooperation, Organisation and Industry or Conscientiousness in addition to subject grades from Grade 1 onwards.

One of the principal contrasts between the GDR system and the current state systems in most of Germany is between the primary years and the secondary. In almost all German states there are onlyfour years of primary education before a student is allocated by various means with varying levels of parent input to one of at leastthree different types of secondary education: Gymnasium, Realschule,Hauptschule or Gesamtschule. In the GDR the primary years were the first four or five but students were not assigned to different sortsof schools on the basis of assessments by their teachers; they simply continued, as they do currently in Finland, in the same school, although with different teachers. The N-Tv article mentions 33 N-tv.de/archive/Schule-in-derDDR-war-besser-article76

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that at that time (2004) Saxony (an Eastern state) was considering comprehensive education up to the end of Year Eight. The SPD was pushing for the same thing in Thuringia. In Brandenburg the Realschule and Hauptschule were being dissolved into the one school type. These tendencies represent a kind of push-back against “Westernization” of the school systems of the Eastern states and give hints about the degree to which those states allowed their schools to continue old “eastern” traditions of content focused “teacher-dominated” styles of instruction. The East of Germany sincethe Unification has naturally been a mixture of initial disruption, subsequent settling down, return to old patterns and values and considerable expansion of educational opportunities due to the new secondary school types fulfilling an increased demand for further education.

Fourteen years after the “Wende (Change)” or the reunification of Germany the Education Minister for Schleswig-Holstein spoke up for aGemeinschaftsschule (Community school) which would educate all childrentogether up to Year Ten. She told the Berliner Zeitung that:

“We should do something against the scandalous situation in which in Germany as in no other country school results depend upon the social background of the parents. The early dividing up secondary education into Hauptschule, Realschule and Gymnasium is not appropriate for the future. We have to dissolve the tripartite school system and allow all students to learn together.”34

This minister does not make it clear why she believed that the social background of parents influences educational outcomes so severely but we can assume that she has in mind either or both of two things: 1: That the children of lower-class and migrant childrencome to school disadvantaged if either the parents (through tuition)or the schools do not compensate for their lesser linguistic and cultural development and their general lesser preparation for schoollife, such as in the area of reading, and 2: That, in accordance with the environmental view of learning, the mixing of the classes will benefit the lower classes. The first of these beliefs is

34Michel, J. Kieler Kultusministerin fordert die Gemeinschaftsschule. Schűler sollen länger gemeinsam lernen. Berliner Zeitung. Archiv 06/12/2004http://www.berliner-zeitung.de/archiv/kieler-kultusministerin-fordert...

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reasonable and argues for the extension of the primary years out to at least seven and preferably 8 to 9 years of age, accompanied by extensive support services for struggling students. The second belief or assumption is not well-founded and if it is seen by the established upper and middle classes as a burden which will be placed, in effect, upon their children, it is unwise politically.

At the time that these issues were being aired in Schleswig-Holsteinand more widely through the media, internal PISA studies were conducted throughout Germany which enabled comparisons to be made between the different states of Germany. These tests and evaluations, known as PISA-E, took place on a much more extensive scale than the international comparison tests and were designed to bring out inter-state differences as well as differences between school types. They were largely summarised in the usual terms of social disadvantage. It was found that in the Western part of Germany, the upper service classes or academics were seven and a quarter times more likely than the offspring of a working class family to attend the Gymnasium and the lower levels of the service classes (white-collar workers, presumably) were just over 4 times more likely than working class background children. However in the old East Germany the inequality of what is called “life chances” wassmaller; the corresponding figures were 3.89 and 2.78 and this couldnot be put down to a higher share of migrants in the population in the West with their supposedly “education-alien” background was evaluated and could not be confirmed35 (PISA-E Wikipedia 23/11/2014)

Nevertheless the overall results were largely seen to confirm the migrant-background disadvantage thesis. (“Die Schueler mit Migrationshintergrund schneiden in der Regel schlechter ab als ihre Klassenkameraden ohne Migrationshintergrund”) Differences from this general rule were seenin a comparison of students without migrant background in Sachsen-Anhalt performing less well than students with the supposed disadvantage in Bavaria. But notably, in reports on the Comparison

35 Wikipedia PISA-E accessed 23/11/201424


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Studies, for the first time the distinctiveness of the Vietnamese students was recorded:

There are also ethnic groups whose members perform much better than the Germans (for example the Vietnamese), as well as better than those ethnic groups whose members come in well behind the Germans (for example, the Turks).

Another kind of test gave some heart to the Eastern states that appeared to do poorly in the PISA-I (initial, real PISA) and the PISA-E. This was the VERA tests conducted at the primary school level. Seven states took part in the initial test, conducted at Year4 level, in 2003 and Mecklenburg-West Pomerania, the north-eastern state embracing the city of Rostock, took top place. Amongst the states of Berlin, Bremen, Brandenburg, North-Rhine-Westphalia, Rhineland-Pfalz (the Palatinate) and Schleswig-Holstein, Mecklenburg-West-Pomerania (or Vorpommern) came out the best in fiveareas tested.

The children of that state were best in mathematical subjects: arithmetic, geometry and a subject called Sachrechnen which involves calculation and assessment. In all three disciplines the Northern-easterners had the highest percentage of students with “considerable” or “advanced” skills. The same state’s children were at the top in writing and orthography (covering spelling and punctuation) and took second place in the subject Sprachbetrachtung which covers the multiplicity of grammatical points necessary for a good command of German. (In Australia it is called something like Management or Control of Language. In Pedagogy “Grammar” is so unfashionable.)

Credit for these good performances was ascribed by Heike Polzin, SPDEducation Spokesperson, to the pre-school provision, a continuation of the situation of the GDR, as well as to increasing provision of long-day schools, another feature largely lacking in the West Germanschool systems although being increasingly adopted. Polzin also mentioned the fact that the primary education was half-extended fromfour to six years by the use of two years of transition and

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observation in which children could change from the initial secondary school choice to another one. Nowadays Mecklenburg-Vorpommern is officially committed to this policy throughout the state as well as to a two-part (zweigliedrig) secondary school system meaning that there are only two secondary school types: the grammar school an another ‘general’ or common school type. (See official site).

At this time (late 2004) Schleswig-Holstein also got quite pleasing results with their students top in Grammar (Sprachbetrachtung) although not enough to satisfy the SPD Education Minister who was a constant target of the CDU which argued for a full implementation ofthe tripartite system on the model of Bavaria (Honigmann Der Honigmann sagt etc). Willi Lemke, the Senator for the city state ofBremen, always struggling with a high quotient of migrants (about 40%) and coming below the 500 point score in PISA tests, was happy to have middling results which at least meant that Bremen did not bring up the rear. (Taz.de archive etc)

It was in 2005 that the book bringing the unique situation of the Vietnamese in Eastern Germany to light was published. The little book, Erfolg in der Nische? Die Vietnamesen in der DDR und in Ostdeutschland (Successin a niche? The Vietnamese in the GDR and in Eastern Germany) was the product of collaboration between the universities of Potsdam in Eastern Germany and Wolverhampton in Britain. In a collection of essays the work portrays the history and the lives of the contract workers who were brought to the GDR in the sixties seventies and particularly the eighties and shows how their strong Confucianist cultural values helped them not merely to survive, but through theirchildren, to flourish in present-day Germany where their achievements are becoming the material of TV reports on exemplary students. In 200636 Karin Weiss, one of the three editors of the book was interviewed by the Tageszeitung and claimed that migrant

36 Taz.de “Ostlehrer integrieren Migrantenkinder besser” 19/04/2006 downloaded from http://www.taz.de/l/archiv/?=archivseite&dig.

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background weaknesses were a problem for the West much more than forthe East because there support programs had been established and thechildren of Russian and Vietnamese background who constituted the principal migrant groups had all benefited from the extensive network of pre-school establishments which was a legacy of the GDR. Later, Weiss was quoted in a Spiegel article, headed “Smart Migrants”37 claiming that the East produced better school results: “We have in all the Eastern German federal states clearly better school results than in all the Western states with students of foreign background.” But the article was mainly devoted to the achievements of the Vietnamese and thus forms a pair with the article cited earlier by Martin Spiewak. The media here than are stepping ahead of the pedagogues and highlighting a weakness in their theoretical framework

The PISA results in Germany might be surprising, but the migrants are lowering the average – is that thejudgement? A new study from Brandenburg shows a completely different picture: students with Vietnamese parents are beating native Germans hands down...

The results stand in striking contrast to the picture of the PISA Studies which portray students from immigrant families as having learning deficits. And Karen Weiss is convinced of the fact that the educational successes of other migrant groups in her own home state and in the other new Federal states of (formerly) East Germany, are similarly high – “we are preparing studies on them right now”

What is new and different in the treatment of an educational question is the irruption into the debate of the voice of the student:

Trang goes to school at 10th grade level in a Gymnasium in eastern Berlin and is proud of the marks shegets. “Only in Latin did I get a three,” says the Vietnamese girl. Otherwise Trang, 16, has only Ones and Twos on the certificate. More Ones than Twos. And she has a clear goal: After matriculation she wants tostudy medicine. (.Note German marks go down from 1 to 5. I. is the best, 2. is Good, 3. is mediocre or average, 4 is unsatisfactory and 5 requires repetition of the work or year)

For that she needs the hated Latin. “If I wanted to study medicine I would have to study longer” the daughter of former GDR contract workers and acknowledges. For that she will not presume upon the parents, since they have to earn their living working very hard with their own gift shop business and they could not finance studies. On Saturdays and in the holidays Trang helps with sales.

37 Mai, M. Schlaue Zuwanderer Ostdeutsche Vietnamesen űberflűgeln ihre Mitschűler. Spiegel Online Schulspiegel. 07/08/2008 downloaded 23/11/2014

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Trang’s success in school, the Spiegel writer Marina Mai tells us, is typical for the second generation of the GDR -contract workers. We learn from a new study undertaken by Karen Weiss that In the state of Brandenburg 74% of children of Vietnamese background attending secondary school go to a gymnasium. Weiss, who is responsible for Multiculturalism and Integration in the state of Brandenburg, sums up: “So the children of Vietnamese parents in school are more successful than the children of native Germans”.

Since in Brandenburg there are 47,000 people with a foreign passportand 132,000 people with an “immigration background”, meaning having at least one parent not born in Germany, the constitute therefore 6%of the population and increasing. In the preschool they are already 11% of the children who have a migrant background. The biggest groupof immigrants are Russian Germans who are classes as asylum seekers.In second place are the Poles followed by the Vietnamese who in the time of the GDR were taken on as contract labourers. The groups typical in the West German states, i.e. Turks are not important in the East and Arabs are insignificant.

Drawing on official statistics for Germany as a whole, Weiss reportsthat in 2007, 19 % of all students with a foreign passport attended a Gymnasium from fifth grade onwards. But in Saxony (an Eastern state) the figure is 52% and in the other Eastern states the percentages are between 34 and 39 per cent. And while in Germany overall 12% of all students of foreign extraction go to Special schools (for weak or failing students), in Thuringia, Saxony and Brandenburg the numbers are only about half that figure.

Before Karin Weiss no-one had taken the trouble to conduct research into the success in school of immigrant background children in eastern Germany. The PISA studies did not single out these students as a specific group. “We report the results for particular group in the chapter on migration only if these groups make up 10% of the year cohort”. That was the justification given by Prof Manfred

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Prenzel from Kiel, co-author of the PISA Studies. And that is the case in any state in the East.

Karin Weiss was annoyed by this. “It is quite a pity that in the whole debate about migrants in schools these stories of success fromthe new Federal states are not presented. Because we could learn from that.” At that point in time, in the absence of studies, Weiss was only able to put forward suggestions as to why non-German students in the East are so successful. “It surely lies in the background of cultural circles in which education is a higher value”, she suggested.

70% of immigrants into eastern Germany derive from Eastern Europe and Asia. Jewish refugees from Russia, Ukraine, the Chinese and the Vietnamese bring a very high valuation of education with them despite having to live on social service subsidies.

“The parents of the successful Vietnamese children speak German poorly, work often as much as seven days a week and have little free time, because they are trying to work their way up out of economic and social marginality. They run textile or clothing businesses, snack stands and similar small businesses

Karin Weiss calls on educational researchers to take on the situation in the East as a challenge. “The results here contradict the thesis, that the success in education of migrants is so slight because the social situation of their families is so poor.” Remarkable results are possible despite the difficult economic situations of families. Immigration, she believes, could be the opportunity for the educational standard of Germany to be raised, ifthe right choices are made.

The importance of pre-school or educational kindergarten as emphasised in the Finnish system and as was maintained by the GDR gets support from Weiss who sees a connection between early attendance at preschool by those who went on to the Gymnasium and their success in school. The East has a clearly higher penetration of pre-schools and kindergartens; in them the children there are already speaking German of course. In the Western states access to

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preschools for immigrants has been particularly poor. Social “siloing” or virtual discrimination does not occur as much in the East as in the West because in the East there are hardly any schoolswith 80% of their students from an immigrant background. The mixingof ethnic backgrounds promotes both linguistic and social integration.

In one of Weiss’s studies more than half of the Vietnamese students mention Germans as best friends. Even Trang’s best friend is a German girl. How else should it be? In her class in the eastern partof Berlin she is the only Vietnamese and she has one schoolmate fromTurkey, one from Russia and one from Chile. All the others in her class are Germans. Trang was also for two years the class representative.

Trang at the age of 16 is one of the oldest Vietnamese girls of the second generation in eastern Germany. The reason: in the GDR the contract workers until the beginning of 1989 were not allowed to bring any children into the world. Anyone who was pregnant had to either leave the country or have an abortion. Those who are older than 19 are those who have been brought over from Vietnam after 1990.

This article in Der Spiegel, as early as 2008, raises the possibility that Germany could lose the reserve of talent offered bythe Vietnamese.

It is still an open question whether those who are successful in their matriculation certificates see their future in Germany. A study has recently shown that many successful academics want to migrate to Turkey. Such studies have not yet been done for Vietnamese students who have gained good final year school or university passes. But they are discussing their job opportunities in Vietnam in internet forums. And like Trang they are making their choice of subjects studied in consideration of the job market in the country of origin of their parents.

Anyone who has a German qualification in Medicine, Economics or Informatics is the possessor of a highly-prized specialty and has no need to establish themselves as a member of the class of “practical workers”. Many former contract workers are in any case contemplating a return to Vietnam as retirees –along with the children who have already studied there.

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Karin Weiss’ call for more attention to be paid to success stories rather failures made little impact on the Berlin Institute for Population and Development.38 It put out an “Unused Potential Index”for different background groups. The sobering summation: there is adeficiency in integration by migrants, particularly Turkish ones even though about half of this group was born in Germany. Amongst the 15 yr to 64 yr olds born in Germany 10 per cent have no school qualification – seven times as many as native Germans of the same ages. Their participation in the workforce is correspondingly low.

The recommendation to remediate this situation is that there be a “more open” access to the “majority society” and that the need be accepted for the “utility of qualifications be made more clear so asto awaken a hunger for education amongst young people.” Thus there is the implication that the usual pairing of education and background forms an unavoidable and virtually fatal pair. And the people lacking qualifications have too little hunger for success in terms of earning power.

But such complacent assumptions seem absurd when confronted with thesuccesses of the students of Vietnamese background according to an internet columnist, Gregor Keuschnig, after he read Martin Spiewak in Die Zeit in the same year. Keuschnig quotes a crucial paragraph from Spiewak.

No other immigrant group in Germany is more successful in school than the Vietnamese: Over 50% of their students make it into the Gymnsasium. This means that more Vietnamese young people are getting their Abitur than Germans are. In comparison to their coevals from Turkish or Italian families their quota of attendance at the Gymnasium is five times as high. (Spiewak, M. Das vietnamesische Wunder Zeit Online Schule 03/08/2009)

Keuschnig puts his finger on the main point that the Vietnamese caseillustrates: sure, social background, material conditions, class andlevel of integration are very important in influencing educational

38 Berlin-Institut fűr Bevӧlkerung und Entwicklung cited in Keuschnig, G. Vermeintliche Wahrheiten http://www.begleitschreiben.net/vermeintliche-wahrheiten

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outcomes. But the strength of a culture and its set of values working through a family may overcome all such influences.

The first person to comment upon Keuschnig’s opinion piece raises aninteresting question in response: Is the school system on its own responsible for the generally poor performance of migrant backgroundstudents? Or should the parents not be held more strongly to account? Keuschnig responds to this with the observation that measures taken by the school system alone cannot make much difference if it has to deal with large parts of the society that are anti-intellectual i.e. with homes in which knowledge, learning books and those who lead the country are despised. He nevertheless goes on to list a number of desiderata if the education system is tocome up to the task which is seems to be failing to accomplish. Most of these points have been mentioned already and largely correspond to the features of the former GDR system or the Finnish system:

educational pre-schooling (not just minding),

country-wide whole-day schooling with meals included,

individual tuition after school where needed,

free school materials,

a single final year qualification to conclude school,

concentration on improvement in the quality of this certificate, not just its extent of coverage of the population,

and finally attention to other forms of training or preparation for employment and not an obsession with everyone going to university.

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Keuschnig concludes that there are many other things that could be discussed including whether the tripartite system should be abolished or modified but that what he offers is at least a start.

Martin Spiewak’s article in Zeit Online for 03/09/2009 39fills out this phenomenon with lots of human detail. It begins by describing the difficulty faced by a principal in an East Berlin Gymnasium in dealing with the names of Vietnamese students successful in the Mathematics Olympiade, a legacy of the GDR. He faces the challenge of their names frequently because 17% of the students at this schoolin the suburb of Lichtenberg come from Vietnamese families and in future, as more come through the levels, it will be more than 30%. And the Vietnamese are particularly strong in Mathematics.

Spiewak explains the origin of these students in the contract workers of the former GDR and recounts the difficulties of their parents after the dissolution of the communist state. They had no secure status for three years, were unemployed and poor and had to establish their own small businesses in order to have the regular income that allowed them to stay in Germany. Eventually they were allowed to stay in Germany as citizens or legal residents. Perhaps the insecurity of the parents in the years immediately after the collapse of the GDR made the parents even more positive towards their children’s educational progress.

It is usually asserted that migrants must achieve a high level of social integration in society if the children are to be successful in school. The number of articles and books devoted to this thesis is testament to the dominance in educational circles of this theory.Die Zeit has even prepared a school assignment on this topic40 If onesearches Google Scholar the number of pages devoted to articles and books devoted to the topics of migrant background,

39 Spiewak, M. Das vietnamesische Wunder. Zeit Online Schule. http;//www.zeit.de/2009/05/B-Vietnamesen/komplettansicht

40 Die Zeit Arbeitsblatt accessed via Google Scholar.33


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(Migrationshintergrund) disadvantage (Benachteiligung) and discrimination (Diskriminierung) is almost endless. The standard view is well summarised by these lines:

Most comparative studies on education deal with the role that educational institutions play in the intergenerational reproduction of the class structure in a given society. Usually the correlation between parents’ socio-economic status (SES) on the one hand, and children’s highest educational degree or status/prestige of their occupation, on the other hand, is used as indicator for the strength of this effect.41

That the topic of migrant disadvantage is a commonplace in teacher-training institutions is shown by the assignments set and completed by students who are able, after getting good marks, to sell their assignments through the internet for others to study. I will refer to one of these, by a Vietnamese student, later on. The content of most of them is similar because they reflect the teaching of the universities or teacher training colleges. The federal government addresses the problems of migrants in papers put out by its committees such as the Bildungsberichterstattung Report of 200642. Migrant disadvantage and consequent inequality of opportunity is considered a truism. But the idea that material poverty and social marginality or, in pedagogical terms, that low cultural capital mustlead to educational poverty is contradicted by the Vietnamese example.

According to Spiewak the success in school of the Vietnamese brings this set of assumed verities into question. One of these is that integration must precede educational success, or, put negatively, that poor educational outcomes always have social causes. The idea that the migrant parents would have had to have been well integrated

41 Schnabel, K. U., Alfeld, C.,Eccles, J. S., and Kӧller, O. And Baumert, J.Parental Influence on students’ Educational Choices in the United States and Germany: Different Ramifications – Same Effect ? in Journal of Vocational Behaviour 60, 178—198 (2002) doi: 10.1006/jvbe.2001.1863

42 Bildungsberichterstattung 2006 mit dem Schwerpunkt Bildung und Migration retrieved from the bildungsserver

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into their new society before their children can do well in school does not find confirmation in the case of East Asian immigrants. Sure, the Vietnamese of the first generation, in contrast to the Turks or the Italians, often completed secondary school successfully. But they struggle with German, live in a virtual ghetto and thereby compose a kind of parallel society.

The fact that the children of Vietnamese contract workers who were placed in dire insecurity and the subject of racist attacks have nevertheless become the model students amongst migrants is the proofof the power of culture. This has already been seen in the United States where Asian students are over-represented at the peak US universities. This phenomenon is being repeated, according to Spiewak, in Germany. He suggests that these two successes are a reflection of the Confucian value system of many Asian cultures.

These Asian cultures do not reflect the values of the West. In Western assessments of cultural background the level of education ofthe parents is rated as very important but so also are certain material possessions of a certain cultural value such as music CDs, books, magazines, newspapers, educational toys and so on. These things tend to be absent in these poor Vietnamese households.

Spiewak describes the background of a particular girl so as to portray a typical origin of a successful Vietnamese student. Dung Van Nguyen’s parents had to live in confined hostel quarters but they always had a place set aside for her to her homework in and they enrolled her early in a crèche so she learnt perfect German. She goes to Gymnasium in Potsdam and with a grade average of 1.5 sheis the best in the class and has gained a scholarship from the StartFoundation which supports gifted migrant students. She is one of the 30% of those so chosen who are Vietnamese. Dung’s siblings alsoattend to grammar school with high marks. The children don’t have anyone at home who can help them with their homework nor are there many books or educational toys or games The entrance hall is full ofboxes of the products sold in the snack stall run by the parents.

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Spiewak describes the life of these small entrepreneurs working in shops selling gifts and knick-knacks (commonly $2 shops in Australia), flowers, nail care, snack bars or market stalls selling all sorts of things. The children usually have to help with the work. Spiewak interviews the father asking how he has managed to have such clever children and the father answers in halting German that all Vietnamese families want their children to do well in school.

Spiewak then quotes Karin Weiss: “Education is the greatest good forVietnamese families.” Even if they are living on social security they may be paying for tuition for their children to help them in school. Desire for learning is the greatest contribution that East Asian families bring from their homelands to Europe, because they say that only education leads away from the rice field. He records that in Vietnam, as in China Japan or Korea students often attend after-school cramming classes or get extra tuition on the weekends. The amount of homework done is much greater there than in Germany. As a result, at the end of the primary school years the Asians have thousands of hours of learning more than German children behind them.

Spiewak reports that a German psychologist, Andreas Helmke, established this superiority in learning effort in a study publishedtwo years earlier. He gave Grade Four children the same mathematic assignments in both Munich and Hanoi. The children in the capital of Vietnam in often poorly equipped schools worked with 50 to a class. Nevertheless the students in the developing country were clearly superior to the Bavarian students. Helmke reported that evenin respect of questions calling for a deeper understanding of mathematics the Vietnamese performed better. This result accords with the PISA study results in which the Asian countries have held the top places for years.

And so Asian immigrant students perform similarly in Germany. Conversations with Vietnamese parents remind Spiewak of the sort of

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remarks heard in the Germany of the fifties such as “You get nothingfrom nothing,” or “the children must have a better life”. Perhaps that is the reason why Vietnamese are called the Prussians of Asia. In contrast to other migrant parents who cannot find their way in the complicated German school structure, the Vietnamese understand immediately that only the Gymnasium leads assuredly to the Abitur, with maybe the lesser alternative being the Gesamtschule. The other schools are of no interest.

Even a Three in a report sets off alarms for many parents. A recommendation after primary school that their child go on to a Realschule frequently leads to a loss of face in the Vietnamese community. Long Minh Nguyen, a 20yr old man, has given some thought to the ways of his fellow Vietnamese. When two fathers or mothers meet up, one of the first questions will be: how are the children going in school? So if performance does not meet expectation there is severe criticism, confinement to the home, even a clip over the ears. “My parents constantly reproached me for not having as good marks as the other students”, he remembers. They were unaware that, at his best, his marks were not good enough for him to go a Gymnasium. And finally, after a huge effort he got an Abitur with a good average. Students are not differently endowed with ability, according to Vietnamese parents, only more or less hard-working. They scarcely ever give up on a child but at the same time weaknesses are rarely excused.

After this there is some discussion of the negative effects of excessive pressure and some mention of a break-down between the generations. Generally however Vietnamese families are close and the members mutually supportive. The last word goes to the not so strong student Long Minh Nguyen: “We want to learn and get ahead. That way maybe we can belong to the elite in this country”

Spiewak’s article has found many echoes in the German media. A month and a half after its appearance in Die Zeit, the whole article

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was reproduced on the website of Deutsche Welle43, with the addition of photographs. One of these bore the caption: Students are not differently endowed with ability, but differently diligent, many (Vietnamese) parents believe. This caption may be taken as summing up the major difference between the “cuddly” pedagogy of the West and the traditional conception of learning that used to be held all over in the past and which is still maintained throughout most partsof the East.

From the Economic News bulletin Wirtschaftsnachrichten 44 came another story personalising the push ahead of Vietnamese students. In an article headed “Vietnamese students --Better than the others” a little of the life and views of a 16 yr old girl is provided. We are told that Kim Hoan Vu has little free time because she is top ofthe class, learns piano and acts as a tourist guide to the Old Masters in Dresden using English, French, Spanish and Vietnamese. Asif it were quite natural she explains her successes in Foreign language competitions, her scholarship and her responsibilities as class and year level representative. “I always had it in me.” She isone of the many German model students in Germany who have gone way ahead of their German fellow students.

She feels that she owes it to her parents to do very well because they have worked so hard for her. She explains that they took a while to understand that even a Two as a mark was good. “If I once got a Two in Maths, that was a drama for my mother. Now she understands that a Two is also good.” So as not to lose her roots she speaks Vietnamese with her parents and most of the time with herolder sister too.

43 Vietnamesisches Wunder - Deutsche Welle www.dw.de/vietnamesisches-wunder/a-440216.

44 Cornelius C. Dpa Besser als die anderen – Vietnamesische Schűler. Wirtschaftsnachrichten 06/12/2010

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Kim Hoan acts like a model citizen at school too. She says that, asa foreigner, she doesn’t want to be a burden upon the Germans. “I would like to give something back for being allowed to live here.” And so she makes a great effort at school and helps fellow students with their assignments. Her parents have drummed into her that she must never come across negatively. Kim Hoan is no isolated case. After long reflection she can think of only one Vietnamese acquaintance who does not attend a Gymnasium. Kim Hoan doesn’t thinkthat she necessarily works any harder than her fellow students, onlydifferently. “Compared with my best friends I am rather lazy,” she says

Across Germany as a whole, 59% of Vietnamese students attend a Gymnasium while this is the case with only 43% of Germans, accordingto Olaf Beuchling, a scholar of education working at the Leipzig university in Comparative Education who has been following the success in school of Vietnamese.

In Saxony (an eastern state) where Vietnamese make up the largest group of immigrants, the difference between the two groups is even greater. Here two thirds of the Vietnamese students attend the Gymnasium while the figure for native Germans is on the same level as in Germany as a whole. The data are in any case slightly deceptive because many Vietnamese have, over time, been naturalised and so appear in the official statistics as Germans.

Beuchling, author of a study based on the Vietnamese in Hamburg45, says “Education in Vietnam has a quite different significance than in Germany. If a person is educated he has really achieved somethingand he improves the prestige of his family.” From interviews with Vietnamese students Beuchling has learnt that many of them have problems with the heavy pressure and have even to go to see psychiatrists. But these are far from the majority.

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The article quotes a Vietnamese father’s words to his son in Year Seven at the Dresden Gymnasium: “You must make an effort in school and be better than the others.” To Christine Cornelius, the journalist he declares proudly: “Last year he got a mark average of 1.3”. A further reason for the pressure is provided in the recent history of this group, and its lesser continuation: i.e. discrimination. Many employers the father says have reservations when they see Vietnamese names on job applications. So he says: “Ifour kids are not better than the others they are at a disadvantage.”

Finally the principal of the Bertoldt Brecht Gymnasium in Dresden isquoted as saying about the 70 Vietnamese out of 800 at his school: “They are very concerned with their personal progress” Those of themthat make it all through school get a very good Abitur. “I don’t know any of them that didn’t go straight on so smoothly”.

The Berlin-based Tageszeitung also contests the usual thesis of migrant disadvantage in its article of the 22 of January 2010 headed“Unremarkable Top Students.” Patricio Farrell46 suggests that publicdiscussion about integration is framed by stories of migrant failureand their ghettoisation. He wants to give the lie to these complacent assertions by highlighting the successful Vietnamese. Again a human face is given to the phenomenon by interviewing a particular but typical individual, a former DDR contract worker who survived ten years non-recognition by running a clothing stall in a public square in Leipzig, “in the cold and rain” in his own words. He now has a successful son, born immediately after the downfall of the Wall, Viet, who is reported to have a marks average of 1.8. He says “After the Abitur in two and a half years I will study Information Science.”

Some of the Vietnamese in Germany are asylum-seekers since the Wall came down and they have the same problems as other fairly recently arrived migrants, according to Karin Weiss. However Thao Nguyen is 46 Farrell, P. Unaufällig an der Spitze taz.de 22/01/2010 accessed at http://www.taz.de/i/archiv/digitaz/artikel/?ressort..

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not one of those. From their arrival in 1990 her parents engaged a retired teacher to teach her, and her sister, German before they went to school. Now she is completing her Abitur in Mathematics, Chemistry and History with a “1 before the point” i.e. with top marks despite a busy schedule involving saxophone, football, tennis and part-time work in a Discount store. On top of that she is scholarship-holder with the START Foundation for gifted students. The CEO of this organisation, Mostapha Boukllouâ, thinks that the reason so many Vietnamese are such beneficiaries is the expectationsthat their parents have of them. The parents’ own qualifications were not recognised so they want their children to get the recognition that was not available to themselves.

However Bui Huy, the president of the Leipzig Association of Vietnamese, sees another reason for the diligence and enthusiasm forlearning: the need to send money back to poor relatives in a poor country. Bui Huy, who is an engineer, also denies that Vietnamese have a natural affinity for scientific subjects. He says instead: “We lay great emphasis on our children not looking formulas up in reference books, but learning them by heart”. Karin Weiss, Farrell writes, sees in the pressure to absorb and retain knowledge a strongpreference amongst migrants for secure jobs. Whether it be medicine, mathematics or management, the courses lead to high socialstanding and are therefore attractive to migrants.

Beuchling, previously mentioned, is a scholar who continues to be interested in the success of the Vietnamese. He receives a mention in the recent article in the Frankfurter allgemeine Zeitung47. Afterthe usual sort of description of the working life of the Vietnamese and mention of the outstanding success of their children, exceeded only by Iranians and Koreans whose parents are members of the intelligentsia of their countries of origin, the article quotes Beuchling referring to the neglect of these people in academia in a

47 faz 17 November 2014 Beruf & Chance)41


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similar fashion to Karin Weiss. It is because they contradict the established theory of the pedagogues.

An article in Die Welt is headed “The best German students come from Vietnam.”48 The subheading states that they often get top performances but that the strict training has its shadow side. Like most media presentations the article gives a human face to the storyby focussing upon an individual ten year old Bao Chau. Her mother isquoted thus: “For a good education for my daughter I will give everything, at any cost. That is the tradition in Vietnamese families.” Beuchling is quoted in this article too, saying: “Vietnamese parents are very education-conscious and put a lot of pressure on their children to perform” He has devoted a book to thisarea of study in which he took his PhD: “From boat people to German citizens” (Vom Bootsflűchtling zum Bundesbűrger”)

Another voice on Vietnamese values is represented by Tamara Hentschel, member of a charity, The Rice Bowl Society, which supports poor Vietnamese. She says:

The Vietnamese work really hard, even when they are ill, often 365 days in the year. And from their children they require hard work – often to help in the shop, but also in school. They drum into their kids that only education makes for a better life. The children see that their parents are putting in a great effort and they feel obliged to repay them for that effort.”

And the journalist responsible for this story sums up the repudiation of the assertions of pedagogy:

The successes of the children of Vietnamese parents contradict the thesis that migrant parents must themselves integrated in order for their offspring to be accessible school. Their frequently bad social situation seems to be no impediment to be the educational successes of their children. Rather the outstanding results are made possible by of the difficult economic situation.

Bao Chau has a busy schedule. She comes out of school after 3:00. OnMonday afternoons she attends Vietnamese language lessons. On Tuesdays she picks up her four year old younger sister from the

48 Peter, F. Die besten deutschen Schűler stammen aus Vietnam. Die Welt 06/02/2011

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kindergarten and takes her along to handball training. On Wednesday she has piano practice in the program. Thursday’s handball again On Friday she has a course in music theory. Every day Bao Chau practices piano for half an hour and does two hours of work. On Saturdays she mainly has hand ball games. And on Sundays? “Then I help with the house work”, she says, “or I read.” If Bao Chau gets abad mark, she is annoyed with herself. “We look together for the mistake”, says Mrs Ngo, “and then I say: ‘Here is your problem’ WhenI give criticism she is unhappy but she knows that I am right.”

This strict style of training reminds us of the practices of the Chinese American mother Amy Chua, author of the bestseller Confessions of a Tiger mother how I make my children winners. According to Amy Chua, Asian mothers are superior to Western mothers who do not make sufficient demands of their children and therefore do not develop them sufficiently. Chua required absolute discipline. Play, hanging out, dawdling or going to children’s birthdays: all that was time wastingwhich was forbidden.

Olaf Beuchling says that the atmosphere is not quite so authoritarian in Vietnamese families. Rather the Confucian traditionis at play, a tradition according to which all can make progress if they learn, whether they be a peasant or the son of a prince. The Vietnamese are also characterised by a need for harmony: they do notwant to disrupt the rhythms of the family or of society through individual desires. It is interesting that Amy Chua, in her latest book, reviewed briefly in a recent edition of the Tageszeitung49, does not list the Vietnamese amongst her leading groups of achievingpeoples. This may be partly because their successes in America have not been so marked or so publicised as those of the Vietnamese in Germany or it may be that she and her co-author, her husband, wish to underline their own grounds for social and economic success rather than concentrate on Confucianism. In any case the same valuesseem to be involved, whether enforced fairly brutally by Amy Chua

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(as she makes out; perhaps in practice she was not so tough) or moregently by the Vietnamese.

We need to avoid the trap of falling into the kind of racism that characterises some of the pedagogues who argue for specific sorts ofeducation for different cultural groups. In that way of thinking theculture seems to own the people rather than the people the culture. Culture is a human artefact and we can construct and reconstruct it as we will. That is why Karin Weiss and Olaf Beuchling are right tosuggest that Germany can learn from its Vietnamese minority. Their attitudes and approaches to education can be studied and learnt fromby Western educators.

Freia Peters in Die Welt50 suggests that the Confucian mentality and the preparedness to comply make Asians the leaders in higher education in Germany. The share of Asian university students in Germany has doubled in the last ten years. Most of the Vietnamese university students are the so-called “Educational foreigners” or, in better English, “international students”. They are coming from Vietnam after completing school to pursue a degree or to get a PhD or other higher degree and Freia Peters in respect of such a student, quotes a health researcher from Vietnam, Vuong Anh Duong, who rarely sees his wife and sons: “If you have the choice – why would you not study in a better country? Making sacrifices to advance one’s career is normal in Vietnam” He admits that Germans are also very disciplined and keen on learning but that they also know how to enjoy themselves. He says: “We Vietnamese often go too far. We ruin our health and our brain – and for the sake of our careers”

Whether this excessive attitude is completely typical or just a reflection of the state of Vietnam at the moment only time will tell. The invitation to comment on TV reports of the excellence of Vietnamese schoolchildren brought forth a host of, (often disappointingly written), responses in the commentaries which made 50 Peters, F. Die besten deutschen Schűler stamen aus Vietnam.

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slighting references to Turkish students. As one of the TV reports shows, animosity is not displayed towards the Vietnamese, at least in Gymnasia, where most of the more academically-motivated students end up, because the Vietnamese are prepared to help other students. They want to be the best for their parents but that does not mean that they will be mean-spirited and competitive with their fellow students. No, the comparison between Vietnamese and Turkish background students evokes hostility towards the Turks, or at the least, critical comments upon their lack of intellectual ambition.

In the most recent media comment upon this issue, Beuchling points out51 in the FAZ (Monday 17 November) that generally Vietnamese students, now all in the ‘West’ since the reunification, have grown up in just the same conditions as those Turkish students who have provided the justification, in the eyes of the pedagogues, of the thesis of the migrant background disadvantage: they are being brought up by parents who are poorly educated, who do not speak German well and who keep largely to themselves. So according to the prevailing wisdom, the success of the Vietnamese is just as improbable for them as it is for children of Turkish background.

Beuchling’s answer to the dilemma is the culture of Confucianism. This Chinese philosophy which has been internalised by the Vietnamese as a result of their country having been a part of China for nearly 2000 years, insists upon the value of education in itselfand as the means to higher or other ends and upon its effect upon a family. If children become well-educated it reflects well upon their parents. And the parents can be involved in the children’s education even if they are not themselves well-educated. One of theTV current affairs reports which can be seen as a YouTube video52 shows a mother whose German is basic checking her daughter’s schoolwork. She reads her daughters work cursorily, notes the marks51 Faz Monday 17 November

52 YouTube Vietnamesische Schűler in Deutschland retrieved from http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OxNOIJCL3Y

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gained and insists that next time the work must be better, and as noted above, she may well be able to see how it may be better and can direct her daughter accordingly. As a teacher myself I have beensurprised and disappointed at how few parents in the state of Victoria actually look at their children’s work. They usually act as though schoolwork were some arcane mystery that they could not possibly help with. This is because, as the Australian social anthropologist Hugh Mackay has remarked several times, the modern Western culture allows parents to delegate their parenting to schools. All they have to do is choose, and possibly pay for, “a good school” and their responsibilities are at an end. You don’t need to be a genius to be a parent, as the Vietnamese know, you justneed not to be lazy, or is it confused ?

The comparison between Turkish students and Vietnamese ones is beingresearched by other academics and Aladin el-Mafaalani at the MűnsterFachhochschule has interviewed many Turkish and Vietnamese parents and he confirms the importance of high expectations amongst the latter. But he does not think that Turkish or Arabic parents have low expectations. The difference he finds is in the trust, as he puts it, that Turkish people place in the teachers and in the schools. For the duration of school the Turks and Arabs hand over responsibility to the teachers and to the school. It is quite different with the Vietnamese: teachers are highly regarded; howeverthey only assign to teachers the role of arbiters who will assess the students fairly. El-Mafaalani explains:“The task of developing their children and thereby responsibility for educational success (for Vietnamese) lies with the parents. This attitude seems particularly suited to the German education system” On the other hand, the more the fostering of the students is entrusted to the teaching staff, the more risky the outcome will be.

According to Beuchling recommendations cannot be derived from the Vietnamese for other types of students. The German policy of concentrating upon integration is directed to the Turkish children

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and is based on the conception that the more integrated they are, the more success they will have in education. For the Vietnamese a greater adaptation to German culture means exactly the opposite: less educational success. This can already be observed “Vietnamese”,he says, “of the second and third generations who are living in Germany, have already lost a part of their Confucianist value system”. The result: their performances in school are already declining, down to the level of German children.

Is it fair to characterise pedagogy as being focused upon integration, neglecting an emphasis upon knowledge, learning, language and memory? It will necessary to quote from a typical pedagogical article with the usual sociological orientation. A paper put out by a body called the IBKM53) at the Carl von Ossietzky University of Oldenburg, Paper No. 37 entitled: What educational opportunities does the German Education system offer to children and youth with migrant background? has this to say on page 11

The principal part of this work is concerned with empirically tested and implementable possibilities for abetter integration of children and youth with a migrant background in our education system. PISA has made clear the integration and the support and development of students with a migrant background has been clearly carried out more successfully in other countries with a comparable migration history (See Auerheimer 2006, 4; see chapter 2.2.1)

I will now refer to two papers that examine the phenomenon of the unexpected success of Vietnamese students. The first is one writtenby a Vietnamese student, Minh Tuan Vu, an assignment on the topic ofEthnic Inequality in a Sociology unit.54

It begins with a statement about the prevalence of discussions of integration in all the spheres of public life: everyday conversation, politics, the media and experts. He also quotes Angela53 IKBM Interdisziplinären Zentrums fűr Bildung und Kommunikation in Migrationsprozessen

54 Minh Tuan Vu. Aktuelle Bildungssituation von Vietnamesen in (Ost)Deutschland. Grin Publications 27 March 2009 accessed via Google scholar.

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Merkel, the federal chancellor of Germany saying: “I consider the topic of integration a key topic for Germany’s capacity to face the future.” He explains that this attention to migrants means mainly attention to Turks because they are the most conspicuous, the least well-educated and least well-integrated. He says that a mass of studies and publications working with data predominantly from West Germany, i.e the Western states, establish the existence of a mass of social and economic problems related to migrants.

Minh Tuan Vu refers to Portes and Rumbaut who are considered the authorities on “incorporation” and “assimilation” and considers thatPortes’ idea of assimilation to the norms and values of the inner-city is more relevant than conventional assimilation theories but still not an adequate explanation given that the share of the Vietnamese of the population of Berlin is very small (below 3.5%). Minh then considers the decisive role of social capital for the second generation including in this human capital which consists of knowledge and skills. All that the Vietnamese of the first generation had was a capacity to earn some income by however precarious a means, not a very significant instance of economic capital so not able to be considered important within the framework set by Lin and Bourdieu. These sociologists assert that social capital consists of three kinds, wealth, power and reputation and the Vietnamese lacked all three. They didn’t even have a secure citizenship status for some years, suffered from the social distancecaused by racial difference and for a time were attacked by mobs in East Germany.

Minh points to one German scholar who had looked at the situation ofAsian people in the United States and had given weight to the importance of the Confucian culture. However Minh attempts to fit this into the conventional sociological framework by suggesting thatConfucianism simply amounts to purposeful behaviour or the pursuit of a goal. For the one thing, he says, for the reaching of such a goal, capital and time must be invested and these depend upon the

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parents. Secondly we do not know how Vietnamese parents decide whichtype of secondary school they want to send their children to. And hesays we cannot assume that they are able to give much help to their children because their command of German is poor. The efforts of this student to remain within the perplexity of conventional sociological scholarship is quite remarkable. He concludes by askinghow on earth was a largely frictionless integration of the Vietnamese possible in East Germany.

To take each of these points in their order: capital in terms of money was not readily available to the former contract-workers but the way they used their time in parenting was at their discretion and to give up some of it to ensure that children did their homeworkand studied would not have been very demanding, only requiring consistency and commitment; with regard to the second there is ampleevidence from the period of the integration of the two states of Germany that most parents were very quickly able to decide which school type was best for their children55 The administration of education at the time of the integration of the Eastern part of Berlin with West Berlin, was in the hands of a member of the Alternative List, a largely left –wing grouping. She took the opportunity to create a swathe of Gesamtschulen, more of them than any other type. There were also many Gesamtschulen in the Western part where the population of households with children was not much greater than in the East. Access to the Gymnasia were quite easy soabout 44% voted for the Gymnasium in both parts of the city and the Hauptschulen gained only ridiculously low percentages. This meant that there were really only two main types of schools but also that a quadrupling of the access of East Berlin children to university was made possible and with the high value placed upon intellectual culture by Vietnamese people it is obvious that they would choose the most academic type of secondary education for their children particularly if it might lead to university study. As to the third, 55 Gruschka, A; Tiedke, M. “Faites votre jeu. Bericht uber die hellen Ost-Berliner Eltern Pädagogische Korrespondenz (1992), pp. 24 – 33.

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the strong use of marks in the German school makes it easy for parents to verify the quality of the work of their children, particularly in Eastern schools where there is a tradition of marking behaviour and diligence. I have to wonder if Minh Tuan Vu isbeing a little disingenuous in his observations of the Vietnamese success in deference to his sociologically inclined teachers at the university.

In the area of education a metaphor taken from the SNCF in France may be apposite. At the approach to railway crossings in France a sign is usually found stating: Un train peut en cacher un autre. In education there are multiple factors in play and a clearly present one, say migrant groups with language difficulties, or structural impediments to real equal opportunity, such as in Germany the tripartite secondary school system, or in Australia the creaming offof middle-class students into private schools, may readily obscure perception of other equally important variables, such as student enthusiasm for learning , or strong parent support for learning, or a high regard for teachers as in Finland. In all of the discussion of integration can be seen the perspective of sociology, a hand-maiden of social management or administrative politics. It is not directly educational in so far as its findings are more of use to politicians and administrators than to teachers or learners; it is aview looking down from above, not a view from below about how to scale the heights of learning or of society.

The second example of this point of view getting in the way of understanding education as a process of learning is provided by the paper provided by Oliver Walter in the Zeitschrift fűr Erziehungswissenschaft56

which compares the performances of Vietnamese students in Germany with those of Filipinos. The article analyses the reading and mathematics competencies of students of Vietnamese and Filipino

56 Walter, O. Der Schulerfolg vietnamesischer und philippinischer Jugendlicher in Deutschland Zeitschrift fűr Erziehungswissenschaft. (2011) 14 :397—419 DOI 10. 1007/s11681-011-0217-0

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descent in Germany using the data set available from the extended sample from PISA 2003 known as PISA-E. This PISA-E involved the same200 schools as were used in the international comparative tests plusanother 1000 schools. Both the Vietnamese and the Filipino groups show similar levels to those of student without migrant backgrounds.

This paper sets out three types of possible integration that may occur: direct or segmented assimilation (Portes and Zhou 1995), downwards assimilation and selective acculturation. Downwards assimilation would appear to be the case of many Turkish, Arab, Italian and Yugoslav groups who resist assimilation to the mainstream by maintaining their culture and language in order to retain group identity and loyalty to old values and to the elders inthe family. Walter concentrates on the two main different paths to integration evident in the United States: direct assimilation manifested by the Filipinos with almost equal earning levels, per capita household income and levels of poverty as for whites, a slightly higher educational level than the white or background leveland a quite low level of non-use of English(Portes and Rumbaut 2006); and the mode of integration of the Vietnamese who have lower levels of parental education, lower levels of mixed race marriages and a much higher level of use of a language other than English in the home and generally low socio-economic status. The path to assimilation or integration of the Vietnamese is taken therefore to be that of selective acculturation.

These subdivisions of integration or assimilation appear to me to beattempts to preserve the overall relevance of the sociological perspective. The general thesis is established in the introduction to the article: “It has been known for some time that young people with a migrant background in general achieve less educational success than young people without a migrant background.” The next two sentences however detract from the universality of this generalisation: “Differentiated analyses which distinguish sub-groups of young people with migrant backgrounds point to

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considerable disparities in the school participation and life-relevant competencies in most of these groups. These disparities areparticularly marked amongst migrant background youth whose parents derive from Turkey, Italy or the former Yugoslavia” The article goeson to say that migrant background groups are generally considered disadvantaged because up to now the research, such as the large-scale PISA assessments, has not pointed up any successful group.

Counter indications are referred to in the second paragraph, first PISA 2006 not showing significant differences in performance in Australia, New Zealand and the UK. The first two even had students with only one foreign-born parent showing greater competence in the sciences. Then, in the US many ethnic groups display greater educational performance than native-born Americans. This is particularly true for East Asian students such as mainland Chinese, Japanese or Koreans as well as for Indians and South-East Asians such as Filipinos. Those are held up as model students. In the United States however, Walter reports, other South-East Asian student groups, such as Vietnamese, Cambodians Hmong or Lao, displayon average lower levels of educational success than whites and this accords with their lower socio-economic status.

Walter’s paper is intended as an examination of the fortunes of two Asian background groups in Germany so as to compare with the American experience but I will not concern myself with those differences here so much as with the differences between the two groups in Germany. In the US the Filipino families are either educationally on a par with white families or slightly higher and the children do as well as or better than their white counterparts. The Vietnamese adults, on the other hand, have about 12 years less education than whites on average but their children do as well in school as judged by grades achieved, as well in mathematics tests but not quite so well in reading assessments as whites.

According to the official office of statistics, there were 88,200 Vietnamese and 23,171 Filipino passport-holders in Germany in 2003.

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The great bulk of the Filipinos is found in the West of Germany at 99.3% while 40.7% of the Vietnamese are still found in the East.

In the academic year 2002/2003 there were 13,693 Vietnamese and 957 Filipinos in the school system. Of these 5,199 Vietnamese and 617 Filipinos were in general educational schools of the first secondarylevel (i.e. years 5 -7 or in Berlin and Brandenburg 7 – 9). The moststriking point to note is the high proportion of Vietnamese in the Gymnasia, i.e. 44.9%. The share for Germans as a whole is about 32% and about 25% for the Filipinos. From this can be concluded that there is a higher level of success in the first stage of secondary education (and thereafter usually since the Gymnasia lead on to higher studies) by the Vietnamese than either the general populationor the Filipinos. School performance in terms of school marks or standardised tests are unavailable but a particular testing program called SCHOLASTIK compared primary school children in Munich and in Hanoi and established that the Vietnamese in Hanoi performed better than those in Munich and showed the Vietnamese to have a higher general level of mathematical awareness. (Helmke et al. 2003)

In referring back to the United States experience, Walter discusses the apparent contradiction that there, though they have only 14% of their parents born in the USA and only 44% speak English at home, the Vietnamese offspring achieve more educational success than whites with the same social background (Portes and Rumbaut 2001, 2006; Rumbaut 2006; Zhou and Bankston 1998). This is frequently explained as attributable to their community and family oriented value system which derives from their Confucian culture.

Walter provides copious statistical information extracted from the PISA-E for both the Vietnamese and the Filipino students for Germanyto confirm both separate integration theses. The Filipinos are morethoroughly integrated in the usual or classical sense because the majority of them derive from families in which the Filipino mother is married to a German man and speaks German in the home. The Vietnamese on the other hand are selectively acculturated, i.e.

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integrated with respect to education and not much else since they have little social capital in the usual sense, very little economic capital and usually a lot less educational or cultural capital.

As he sums up Walter argues that the findings of his analysis of thePISA-E data suggest that, despite all the reservations that might bemade, young people with a migrant background living in Germany can achieve as much success in education as native Germans. Migrant background cannot therefore, on its own, be taken as a risk factor when it comes to education. Indeed, what is established is that though from a migrant background and with an unfavourable family situation (with in many cases only one parent) and without German being used much in the home, students can nevertheless be successfulin school. He reaffirms the viability of two distinct modes of integration: direct assimilation in the case of the Filipinos and selective acculturation in the case of the Vietnamese. Finally however he affirms the most important point for education, the significance of increasing the efficiency of learning processes and of emphasising the role of education in social advancement. This, he says, corresponds to the furtherance of learning behaviours rather than demands for cultural adaptation.

Although the case of the Vietnamese in Germany, and particularly theEast German Vietnamese tends to invalidate the simple or crude equation of migrant background equalling disadvantage, it does not absolve educators entirely from the responsibility to take account of environmental factors in attempting to raise the educational level of sectors of the population that do not seem to be benefitingfrom school. It does suggest that teachers alone are not the only agency involved in education and the Vietnamese case, and those of most Asian countries, suggest that the element of effort has been sorely neglected in most current pedagogy. What probably would benefit understanding is a comparison of the performance of Vietnamese students in western Germany with those in the East of Germany since two important factors differ in the East from the

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West. First to consider would be would be the structural question. Pre-school education is a part of the educations systems of all the states of the East so language problems are considerably less important in those states than in the West. Secondly, all East German secondary schools are now duopartite. They consist of the Gymnasia themselves and of a general secondary school managing all other students after year 4 for five six or seven years whereafter some can separate off to go to a Gymnasium.. And all schools treat the first two years of secondary as years of orientation so as to more or less equal the effect obtained in states such as Berlin or Brandenburg where primary school goes for six years instead of the four which is the norm in almost all Western states. This is a structural difference which may well have mattered a lot in the success of the Vietnamese students because the concentration of difficult or weak students in Hauptschulen does not occur and all teachers must find effective means of dealing with weaker students, observing practices that were established in the DDR common school system.

The second factor would be what I hinted at in the beginning of thischapter: a different teaching style in the East, namely, a more old-fashioned teacher-controlled traditional style of teaching and classroom management. This claim is tied up with two main differences between eastern schools and those of the West. By all accounts the learning of scientific subjects was given greater importance in the East than in the West. The POS was moreover an institution in which the transmission of what had been pre-determined as essential knowledge was the primary role of the school, despite the state’s injunction upon all teachers to contribute to the formation of a new “socialist human being”. Studying Berlin teachers a student57 found that 33.5% of all East Berlin teachers considered that the transmission of knowledge was

57 Raser, M. Ostdeutsche Lehrer im Transformationsprozess Die Ungestaltung des ostdeutschen Bildungswesens ab 1989. Grin Publications accessed throughGoogle Scholar.

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their most important goal whereas this was counted as the most important thing by only 12.7% of West Berlin teachers. With regard to personal development, West Berliners to the extent of 47% considered their pedagogical skills more important than their basic knowledge while for East Berlin colleagues the figure relating to pedagogical skills was only 22.9%) And secondly but consistent with a focus on knowledge transmission was the authority and standing of the teacher who had responsibility for student progress towards the state but not towards the parents.

With the Wende all of that was changed. The new orientation of obligations was expressly addressed in the laws that established thenew educational structures during the Wende. The right of parents orguardians to educate their children and to sue schools was enshrinedin law along with students’ freedom of speech and right to file grievances. Parents and children were given the right to participatein decision-making on school councils58. Parents were now consumers in so far as they had the choice about the kind of school their children attended: confessional and other sorts of private schools were now available and there were as many as four different types ofsecondary school although soon this came down to two. For a time this shift in the power relationships caused further discomfort to the teachers in service who were already preoccupied with retaining their employment59 (Mintrop p. 363).In the GDR teachers had been obliged to visit students who were struggling or misbehaving in their homes and this practice reinforced their intellectual and social authority. Consistent with “progressive” pedagogy the parentswere now entitled to complain about teachers and generally consider teachers to be working for them, the “customers”, by providing the service of educating their children.

58 Mintrop, H. Teachers and Changing Authority in Eastern German Schools. Comparative Education Review, Vol. 40. No. 4 Special Issue on Democratisation (Nov., 1996) pp. 358-376

59 Ibid. p 363.56


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Teachers in service at this time of great change were enthusiastic in many cases about the removal of restrictions upon their teaching practice. The Western tradition of loose guidelines meant the teachers had much more scope to frame their lessons according to their own classes and their interests. Reh and Tillmann60 report the enthusiasm with which some teachers grasped this opportunity and travelled in their thousands to the West to acquire new teaching materials and to visit Western schools and receive lessons in the new “free work” and “open classroom” or “behaviour-directed” approaches. But many also were highly sceptical, being in many casesold hands themselves, about what they saw as a lack of order, inadequate discipline and sometimes chaos in Western classrooms. One teacher whom they cite wondered about the real usefulness of group work. He did not perhaps understand the usefulness of group work as a means of disguising a lack of educational work on the partof the students.

The teachers in this period survived through the many pressures to change, adapt and take up new responsibilities but it is probable that in most cases they fell back upon their own old methods of teaching except where the lower ability, less motivated classes in Gesamtschulen or Hauptschulen forced them to adopt the sorts of techniques and approaches such as group work and project work that make the management of classes possible when little direct instruction can be achieved. They were supposed to spend a lot of time surveying lots of new material for use in teaching but in fact like most teachers they fell back on what they knew best and which was the most “lesson-ready” and this was the quite tightly prescribed material of the DDR system. In a study conducted in 1998 Karin Schäfer-Koch61, it was found that teachers in Mecklenburg West

60 Reh, S. And Tillmann, K-J. Zwischen Verunsicherung und Stabilitäts-Suche.Der Wandel der Lehrerrolle in den neuen Bundesländern. Die Deutsche Schule,86. Jg. 1994, H.2 accessed through Google Scholar.

61 Karin Schäfer-Koch57


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Pomerania were able to stay familiar with the books and so forth that they had used as school students and only needed in teacher training to learn to use the teachers guidebooks to those textbooks as their principal aides in lesson preparation.. All of this old material they could and did resort to in the new period in which they had to evaluate new textbooks and materials. Their old networksof contacts and contacts helped them to confront the new difficulties. The teachers in MV had received more training in the use of lesson resources than their colleagues in a Western state, North-Rhine Westphalia, even though their training occurred over a shorter period. They were able in the post-Communist period to see that some of the material was too simplistic or schematic but it didprovide a structure within which to incorporate new elements if thatseemed desirable62.

Over the nineties it became apparent that the East German teachers had survived the amalgamation of the two states and the absorption of the schools of eastern Germany into the education systems of the BRD with their self-respect intact. Their reputation for old-fashioned teaching styles began to spread throughout Germany becausethey had been guaranteed employment under the contract conjoining the two states (the Greifswald Beschlusse) and as the population in the East declined and schools closed they found employment in western states. CDU representative and office-holders and even unionspoke-persons expressed reservations about teachers from the former DDR being employed in the West63 (). One young primary teacher, only recently trained eastern Germany soon after being taken on in Kasselin the state of Hesse was told by a mother that she came from “the zone” a reference to the early cold war period of Russian occupation. The teacher replied that she was from Thuringia and hadn’t the mother heard of the program to recruit teachers from Thuringia to fill gaps in Hessen’s needs? Her employer was very

62 Ibid. p. 372

63 No author Kűbelweise Schmutz Der Spiegel 46 1996 pp. 90 – 9358


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happy with her level of commitment, we are told. This article sums up the approach of the teacher as follows: “Accustomed to strict discipline and teaching from the head of the class (Frontalunterricht) whereby the teacher is the ‘ringmaster’” But shenow enjoys new freedom herself. In her previous school in Gera the workbooks were constantly being checked and she had continually to justify her teaching behaviour. Another ex-DDR teacher, somewhat older is said to be no longer the “ringmaster” but she reports that she was deeply shocked by the disorder in the class that she took over and that she quickly changed that. Finding there were no didactic aids such as she was used to in the form of magnetic boardswith letters on them she had to improvise, remarking: “perhaps our colleagues here can learn something from us”. A critic of the teacher-loan program changed his mind after spending some time in school lessons in Thuringia and apologised for his previous harsh criticism.

Many more ex-DDR teachers came over to western schools over the nexttwo decades and continued to arouse fears and resentment. Alan Posener in August 201064 wrote a very sarcastic description of the performance of an older teacher brought over in the western part of Berlin from the East. The teachers are very strict, hold up the highest standards of correctness in language and behaviour and consider themselves better-trained than the “Wessis”. Posener instances several employments of ex-DDR teachers in Western schools and administrations. In one Spandau Gymnasium there were so many that the “Wessi” teachers joked that they would soon have to performflag salutes. Posener concedes that the success of Saxony and Thuringia in the PISA tests seem to justify the claims of the Easterners. Concentration on fewer materials and a centralised curriculum in the DDR style seems to have been more effective.

However Posener rejoins to these arguments a questioning of PISA itself. A lecturer in mathematics didactics, Professor Jahnke,

64 Posener, A. Die Welt 23 August 201059


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concedes that even the weaker DDR students are better in average than those in the rest of Germany because they had all had it drummed into them so that they could regurgitate it. He calls this “PISA good” or “nominal learning” or “cramming”. In addition to thisPosener quotes a teacher trainer, Christine Sauerbaum-Thieme, suggesting that it is all just directed to the acquisition of competencies. She for her part regrets the lack of focus on creative thinking. This she says is no longer an educational goal. The bias of Western pedagogues against teacher-controlled approachesis further indicated in of a typical academic’s remark65 that qualitative questions regarding the renewal of the school need to include alternation of teaching methods including the introduction of project teaching, lessening of the importance of marks and the introduction of verbal assessment

Sauerbaum-Thieme recalls a trainee teacher planning to change seminar because the leader of the class described the DDR as a dictatorship. Her complaint is that the “cramming” pedagogy of the DDR is continuing on in the next generation. Jahnke sees that the DDR pedagogy is embodied in the current teacher trainees. He complains that they are in favour of “quiet and order, for proceeding in small steps and learning things by heart. They are against reform pedagogy (the German version of “progressive education” or Pedagogy).

And so we see that the established pedagogical educators hold up principles and values that many teachers in practice or about to start cannot realise: “creativity”, “creative thinking”, “originality”, “critical thinking”, “learning through play” and manyother ideals that they claim can be taught but for which they never provide proof. This is a challenging kind of rhetorical technique commonly used against traditionalists by the pedagogues because these alternatives are certainly more attractive than rote-learning,

65 Schmidt, G. Bildungsreform in der DDR. Grundlegende Erneurenung der Schule? Forum E 43 (1990) 2, pp 9-12 accessed through Google Scholar.

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drill, memorisation, read, read, read, study, study, study, practice, practice, practice. Against traditional rather boring traditional techniques of learning the pedagogues counter-pose attractive entertaining and enjoyable projects and activities. Education consumers, i.e. primarily parents, are easily taken in by these attractive alternative suggestions. Rarely however are the pedagogues called on to prove that their approaches are realistic. Of course one would like schools to develop creativity; but cannot it be done ? Can creativity be taught ? Can creativity be transmitted from one teacher to 25 students in a few lessons ?

Until the pedagogues come up with a miraculous testing system or survey that establishes the superior value of their supposed “creative” teaching styles we can expect to see a continuation of teachers trying to impart knowledge and the absorption and implementation of knowledge by students in the old usual ways. In Schäfer-Koch’s article we get a rare but valuable admission66 (p. 368) that teachers mostly used time-honoured teacher-centred forms of instruction, whether they are DDR-trained or qualified Western teachers ( in allen vier Subgroupen haben auch nach der retrospektiven Einschäyzung mit den Lehrervortrage und dem gelenktenUnterrichtsgespräch eundeutig lehrerzentrierte Arbeitsformen im Vordergrund gestanden) [Schäfer-Koch p. 368] She also reports that in the four groups that she examined, two in a western state, two inan eastern, little or practically no use was made of either group work or programmed instruction.

Meanwhile amongst another PISA-E was conducted and amongst others Martin Spiewak reported on these latest state comparisons conducted in 201267. The pattern of regional differences was distinct. Only Bavaria was able to achieve the same level as the schools of easternGermany in mathematics. It could not however keep up in chemistry, physics or biology where the year nine students in Thuringia, 66 Schafer-Koch

67 Spiewak, M. Die Zeit Online 11 October 201361


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Saxony, Saxony-Anhalt and Brandenburg got better results in all those subjects. Spiewak conceded that the eastern schools had no migrant problem (though he might better have said a much lesser migrant problem) and these tests did not concentrate on language problems but on those of science and mathematics where presumably language mastery is less important. On the other hand the eastern states are less comfortable economically than those in the West; even in poor Mecklenburg West Pomerania students have been shown to be a year and a half ahead of those of wealthy Bavaria. Nor has the success in the East been achieved at the price of greater social inequity. The study again showed a strong correlation between student achievement and their background but this correlation is weaker in the East.

The summary of the 2012 PISA-E or inter-state comparison studies makes no statement about the reasons for the differences in test results between the East and the West. It does however give indications: it comes back to the subject matter instruction, i.e. to the teacher. For one thing there is the number of the lessons devoted to those subjects which in the eastern states, particularly in Saxony, is much higher than in the West. A higher number of subject hours does not alone guarantee better results for students. The time must also well employed, meaning well-trained teachers.

It has been known for some time by educational research that teachers who are well-grounded in their subject knowledge, as well as well-trained pedagogically, produce better instruction. In the latest inter-state studies of student performance the Institute for Quality Improvement has compared the results of students whose teacher has studied Mathematics at university with those who were taught by a teacher who has not done so. On average they come out with a level of difference in knowledge of more than half a school year.

It has now been shown that, in the East, virtually all teachers who teach mathematics or science have studied these subjects, mostly of

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them before the reunification of Germany. Teacher-training in the GDR in mathematics enjoyed a good name in the West amongst mathematics specialists. It was reputed to be demanding and instructionally realistic. In the sciences great value was placed in experiments and trials. Continuing on until today many schools ineastern Germany focus strongly upon subjects involving figures and clear rules. To a large extent that is not the case in the old federal states (i.e. the West). In Lower Saxony or in the Saarland, according the recent IQB report, more than a third of the teachers of physics are teaching with qualifications acquired after initial teaching.

A number of interesting comments were provided over the internet to this article. One suggested that the teaching of set theory in primary schools in the GDR helped to smooth the path of students into mathematics, particularly for weaker students. In the West, against the advice of experts, parent groups had banned set theory from the primary schools. Another commentator suggests that “projects” distracted from real learning because such things helped principals to get their picture in the paper. This person also remarked on the low regard in which teachers were held by parents who like to stick their nose in and tell them what to do and agreed that shortages of science-based teachers would lead to lesser student outcomes in science. This problem would not be solved by allowing science trained graduates get into teaching more easily (another commentator’s suggestion); rather the requirements should be made more demanding because currently science graduates coming into teaching are looked down upon by long-term career teachers. The final comment that I want to mention hints at why science teaching might not quickly get a boost in the West. The writer suggests that both schools and teacher-training institutes are the last remaining habitat for a whole range of easily available occupational groups while scientists have many outlets and do not have to maintain their influence in the schools through the exerciseof power. Only the planned economy (of the East) was able to break

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the power of the “philologues” and raise the sciences to the level that they actually have in the people’s economy. This commentator finds it significant that the Gymnasium school forms are essentiallydistinguished from each other on the basis of which languages are taught within them while neither schools oriented engineering knowledge nor to informatics/algorithms/mathematics nor to life sciences are available .

As he says that’s how things turn out when philologues, advise, lawyers decide and the sciences are just the means to the end aimed for, namely production of taxation income to support all the remainder.

N-tv suggested that after the demonstrated the superiority of eastern students the states would try to learn from each other in respect t of teaching training. The president of the KMK, Srephan Dorgelohn announced that there would be greater cooperation. It was found that 15% of teachers of maths in Gymnasia had not studied the subject at university.

A report in the Tagespiegel in Berlin68found that Berlin students hadweaknesses in primary school in science to make up for but that the eastern districts did this for the averages for Berlin as a whole. Neighbouring and surrounding Brandenburg had benefited from the PISAshock and from examples that were related to real life and to the new educational standards. This paper reported that scholars were reluctant to attribute the East’s success in these comparisons to possibly better teacher training. What they noted was that was moretime was given to the learning of maths and science in eastern states. Insufficient competence in English was attributed in the report to insufficient teachers specialised in English. The education minister of Saxony Anhalt remarked that the self-image of Eastern Germans had always been marked by strength in the sciences and his state would have to be concerned about this, in light of the68 Kűhne, A. And Tillmann, W. Warum der Osten die Nase vorn hat Der Tagesspiegel 11/10/2013 downloaded 25/01.2015

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immediate wave of retirements, i.e. about how to hold up this commitment.

It has seemed difficult at times for Germans interested in educationto separate the issue of the GDR approach to education at a structural level from the greater focus upon content in the trainingof GDR and post-communist teachers, probably because the teachers are predominantly the same people. Ralf Schuler69 in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung attacked the Eastern School myth in August 2010. He felt more entitled than most to be sceptical about the claimed superiority of the Polytechnische Obershule having gone through it. He mentions of course the determined indoctrination of the school and suggests that the “common learning” of the non-selective school was not any more efficient at producing social mobility than the western selective system for the reason that family background, i.e.primarily level of interest in education on the part of the parents,is what determines whether young people go on to further study. He claims that even the extensive pre-school system did not affect thisvery much. In contrast to others he does not mention ideological “deputation” to the pre-university senior college called the Erweiterte Oberschule that he must have attended as the principal reason that social mobility did not occur. Despite many strenuous efforts to promote the children of the workers and peasants, precisely considered to be the ruling classes, the offspring of the intellectuals found themselves largely alone at the university. He suggests instead that efforts to promote the workers and peasants whose class origins were noted in class lists simply failed due to very demanding and rigid teaching styles. If students were weak due to insufficient effort they left school early and got apprenticeships. He also suggests that if there were people who claimed to have worked their way up from humble origins this was because virtually everybody was lower-class in Easter Germany. This is credible given the enormous loss of talent suffered by the communist state to the West.69 Schuler, F.

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Schuler agrees partly that the Finnish school system is a copy of the GDR one but he remarks that a big difference is that the finns developed a very elaborate system of supportive and remedial assistance to ensure that a class grouping stayed together until theend of the compulsory years. This was not the case in East Germany.

Schuler mentions the principal means of advancement In the GDR through education as due to the selection at early ages into specialschools devoted to Sport, Russian, Music or mathematics. Quite reasonably he suggests that the POS did not have to prove itself against PISA tests or other kinds of evaluations such as have taken place in the West. In many ways Schuler’s picture of education in East Germany recalls the sleepier fifties and sixties of most Western societies when, as in most of the period of the GDR, unemployment did not hang over the young population. Perhaps some ofthe Ostalgie that fuelled sympathy for the GDR education system is simply nostalgia for earlier, simpler more secure times.

Schuler makes a perhaps unintended compliment to the GDR school whenhe mentions its centralised curricula:

As disastrous and tortuous as central control was in the field of ideological indoctrination and in the training or mis-training of young people was, just as meaningful and effective was the the centralisation in the interdisciplinary elaboration of efficient curricula.

When in the Eastern school in physics lessons vibrations and waves were taken up at the same time in maths trigonometrical functions (sines, cosines, tangents and so on) were dealt with so that the natural derivation of the abstract functions went along with the calculation of waves in both subjects.

Photosynthesis was treated in Biology after chainforming hydrocarbon had been explained. First came the structure of the atom and elementary forms ofcohesion in chemistry lessons and the came the splitting of the core and so forth.

He suggests that it might seem pedantic to pay attention to such elements of coordination but it is decisive for successful

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transmission of knowledge and he finds that such attention would greatly benefit his own children who have to deal with a complete lack of it in their western schools. He suggests that this lack of interdisciplinary coordination of subjects and years has led to a decline in general knowledge and glaring gaps in essential knowledgethat trainers and universities are troubled by. As he says: “the fragmentation of curricula is an unresolved task for the education system”

Like many people Schuler does not believe that mingling all categories of students together is appropriate and making the subject matter of primary school and middle school continuous is notthe complete answer. He also thinks the Hauptschule can work if it is made suitable to its task in the sense that its workforce adapts to its clientele. He ends by stressing that schools stand and fall with their teachers, not by the name they go under. And parents mustbe involved.

Schuler implied in his article that schools cannot create Einsteins out of peasant yokels or humble workers and reminds us of the contradiction that beset education in the GDR. Middle-class qualified occupations were not better remunerated than skilled worker occupations so there was always little motivation on the partof students to achieve brilliant marks in their schooling. But the schools being staffed largely by continuing GDR teachers were operating in the post-communist era in a new context of individual opportunity, ambition and possible social advancement or failure. The greater pressure to perform and comply with the principal goal of the school, namely to transmit knowledge, combined with their relief from the task of indoctrination, could make the schools of the East much more efficient than those in the West.

Germany today is absorbing its past and reconciling differences between the two parts of which it was composed until 1990 so articles about the successes of the Eastern schools in comparison tests make references to the traditions of the East even though all

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of the old GDR school system has disappeared. The reason is that somany of the personnel of the old system continue to work in education and are able to maintain some of their old traditions. Fűller70, writing in Der Freitag in October 2013 refers to the GDR’s mathematics Olympiad when referring to the successes of the East in the inter-state (PISA-E) comparisons of 2012. Fuller reminds us thatthe thoroughly ideologically marked Einheitsschule had to be abolished but now we can see that beyond the Elbe everything is ok again. And the success of the eastern schools shows that they have kept the best of their traditions, strength in the sciences and in Maths.

Fűller goes on to make critical comparison with a Western tradition in education: overemphasis upon knowledge of literary references buta distaste for Mathematics. An important literary academic in a book asserting everything that one ought to know to be a cultured person (Dietrich Schwanitz 1999 Bildung: Alles, was man wissen muss.) suggested that it was fine to not be able to understand triangles because maths is yucky but to not know some part of the substance ofa poem by Schiller or to misunderstand the role of Gretchen in Faustwas culturally serious. Shades of the Two Cultures by C.P. Snow !

Fűller also points out that the eastern school system is fairer thanthe western one because it has moved to a two-tiered secondary school system more quickly than the West has. In Baden-Wurttemburg and in Bavaria they hate the idea of a two-part school system and the Realschule, old Mittelschule, is hanging on. And many in the West still resist the idea of any alternative path to the Abitur than the Gymnasium. But how does it come about that the country accepts that the city states, Berlin, Bremen and Hamburg still suffer from so much educational poverty, along with Saarland and North-Rhine Westphalia ?

An anonymous commentator following this article attributes the West’s belated efforts to catch up to the East’s lead in science to 70 Fűller

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the Sputnik scare of 1957 and to the building of the Wall (in 1961).This was intended to conserve East Germany’s trained people and thiscommentator claims that this closure caused the West to try to produce its own experts instead of robbing them from the East. The effort to renovate West Germany’s school system did not last long. This writer also thinks the language factor made a lot of differencein the internal PISA tests (the PISA-E) and lists the results of thestates from top to bottom ( from 549 in Saxony to lower Saxony with 503 points in the PISA–type ranking system) associates this with migrant density in each state and then adds the scores for migrant groups from different backgrounds, all below the satisfactory 500 point level, with Turks the worst with only 437 points. This commentator ripostes to the claim that the East did not value Germany’s literature and cultural heritage, quoting Lenin in a way that does not seem entirely apposite. Finally, and more persuasively, he suggests that the medium of “stupidification” knownas TV had a few years advance in the West over the East.

And so it seems that the demise of the GDR education system is stilla topic of interest and controversy. Although as a socialist “Einheitsschule” it can no longer be said to exist, the Ostschule asan alternative, largely anti-pedagogical style of education continues in the persons of many of the teaching staff continuing towork in schools despite the many vicissitudes of the Wende. One suchexample is provided by the Tagesspiegel for the 24th of August 2014. Barbara Steiner71 is said to want most of all to take away from children the fear of mathematics. One of her lessons is observed anddescribed .The lesson deals with Thales theorem dealing with the calculation of angles, circles and equal-sided triangles. The principle is quickly explained , then practised: one task after another. About the class, the reporter, Barbara Kerbel says:” Despite the teacher-directed teaching and although it is given no connection to practical connection life (!), they all concentrate ontheir books and draw circles with their compasses” She reports that71 Steiner, B.

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the atmosphere is relaxed and that the teacher considers that she has a good rapport with her students.

This 55 year old teacher, over 32 years of service, had been in a Polytechnische Oberschule in the times of the GDR and taught all levels from primary up to year ten. She says that she has done everything. At this school, a Gymnasium in the south-Thuringian cityof Sonneberg with 900 students, out of 70 teachers more than 40 werein the teaching service before the Wende.

And so as Thomas Vitzthum72, writing in the Berliner Morgenpost for the 12th October 2013 in relation to the PISA-E interstate comparisons says, the majority of the teachers in the East are between 40 and 60 years of age. The advantage that the East is said to enjoy in regard to the migrant component of the population is conceded by Josef Kraus, president of the German Teachers guild: “The West has partly to deal with difficult migrant clients, while in the East generally there are fewer migrants” but he also remarks:“Most of them come from Vietnam and are in many cases better than students without a migrant background”.

Differences experienced by Vietnamese students in western schools compared to eastern ones can only be considered to have mattered in primary schools where old DDR-type traditional values of order and correctness may have given the Vietnamese in the East an initial advantage but the greater support provided by the state in integrating Vietnamese, as reported by Olaf Beuchling, and the longer time of their settlement might well have evened things up. Only comparative studies will make this clear.

Comparative studies may help to clarify debates about selective versus comprehensive schools. Schools of the East of Germany are considered fairer because they are moving towards the comprehensive pattern by using only two secondary school types. But the achievement of comprehensiveness will not tend to raise standards

72 Vitzthum, T. Osten rechnet besser als der Westen, 12/10/201370


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if the educational process is meant to occur merely by the ‘spreading’ of the higher culture of the upper and middle classes onto the lower, migrant or working classes. This type of thinking isthe result of thinking of education as a product of the social environment and as an entitlement, as a ‘good’ to be ‘distributed’ equally to all classes and types of people. This false notion is a natural concomitant of the consumer society but it is disconfirmed by the experience and example of the Vietnamese students living and swotting in Eastern Germany. They are a powerful indicator that theelements of family and student effort have been under-rated and all the other contributions to educational process have been over-estimated.

At least one study73 of the distinctive behavioural and cultural differences has been made of Vietnamese students as compared to “native” students. In 2009 at the suggestion of the Union of Vietnamese in Berlin and Brandenburg along with the Commissioner forIntegration, the Migrant council of Lichtenberg initiated a survey of the living conditions and level of integration of Vietnamese children and young people of school age. The survey instrument involved questions about the demographic composition of the Vietnamese students, their familial situation and the style of family life, their school experience and level of achievement, theiruse of their free time and their interests, their observance and maintenance of their cultural identity and life in general in Germany and their plans for the future.

An initial meeting of virtually all the Vietnamese students was heldin the summer of 2010. Ultimately 87 survey questionnaires were returned. The students questioned and responding were between the ages of 5 and 19. The average was 13 years, 58% girls, 85% born in Germany, 34% were naturalised German citizens, 43% came from the

73 Marquardt, H. ,Beigang, T., Kargus, M. Erste Erweitung einer Befragung unter vietnamesischen Schűlerinnen und Schűlern in Berlin-Lichtenberg. Berlin June 2011 accessed through Google Scholar

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suburb of Lichtenberg, 13% from Friedrichshain-Kreuzberg and the rest from six other districts.

The great majority (87%) lived in traditional families with a motherand a father and in 93% of these cases both parents came from Vietnam. The majority of children (86%) had siblings in most cases one or two. 90% of the respondents had attended kindergarten.

A footnote on the second page of this report emphasises the same thing that is mentioned in the Youtube video, namely the concern to make a good impression on one’s fellow citizens by being serious, truthful and reliable. This is connected up with the welfare of the family as a whole. The family is a higher value than the individual.

About two thirds of these Vietnamese students spend an hour per day on homework despite having to contribute to family welfare by cleaning, cooking or looking after siblings.

Forty-five per cent of these students go to Gymnasia. Fifty-six percent report their highest mark as 1 or 2. Girls get slightly highermarks than boys. Forty-nine per cent of students and 52% of parents are dissatisfied with the marks obtained but 59% of the parents praised the children for these marks. 83% of parents attend parent nights. The children give their teachers “average” marks (i.e. 2 or 3 on the German inverse 5 point scale by which 1 is excellent and 5 is a fail). The students give their friends much higher marks.

Around one third of students spend more than an hour per day on homework. In the opinion in the parents in their great majority (85%) and a slightly lesser percentage of the students (75%) a good school qualification is very important. Almost all of the students who are older than 14 want to go on after school to study at university or other tertiary institution although they are not yet sure what to study. About a quarter of these students are getting tuition in the complete range of subjects but this is no higher thanamongst the general school population in the age range 10 to 14.

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They socialise predominantly with fellow Vietnamese but no more thanonce a week. Enquiries about their music and sporting sympathies show them as not diverging significantly from those of their fellow students but as having a greater range. More than two thirds agree that maintenance of their Vietnamese culture is very important. Thesame percentage deny experiencing prejudice but the remaining third describe the usual manifestations of racist hostility.

Amongst the criticisms that they levelled against German students with whom they did not have good relations were that they were selfish, had little interest in school, were indifferent to everything, undisciplined and disrespectful towards teachers. As indicated above with several examples Vietnamese students expect to put considerable effort into their education and hold themselves responsible for their own progress. Helmke has established that this attitudinal component of Vietnamese students is consistent withthe Confucian concept of education. As summarised by Herman-Gűnter Hesse74(p. 8)

Helmke (2001) reports on the high correlation between repetitive and meaning-focused learning strategies in Vietnam in comparison to the low one in Germany. Western students use repetition as a learning strategy only at times when they want to be sure to retain something in their memory. Westernstudents believe that understanding arises by sudden insight; for Chinese students on the contrary understanding is the result of a tiring process which requires considerable effort.

The implication of this for Western teachers is that with such willing students high demands need to be made. If more and more, mainly primary school, students in Germany are exposed to the demanding (not necessarily authoritarian) style of teaching importedsomewhat involuntarily from the East by western states, then more and more students will be better prepared for the demands of secondary education.

74 Hesse, H-G. Internationale Schulleistungsvergleiche und interculturelle Lehr-Lern-Psychologie: zwei einander fremde Forschungsstränge. Ein Plädoyerfűr ihre Integration. Trends in Bildung international (2005) 11, p 1-13

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In a discussion over teaching methods conducted by Martin Spiewak with Andreas Helmke in 200575 Helmke stated that whether teacher-dominated question-and-answer type lessons or teacher organised group work were used the most important thing was that all the lesson time be spent on learning. Asked if he was aware of method-based differential results in the different German states, Helmke said that he was not, but that in Asia, particularly Vietnam, where he had studied for some time, practically no time at all was spent on anything other than teaching, meaning that there was much more time for learning. And this despite classes as big as 64 students. Asked if that was the reason that his previous studies comparing Hanoi maths students with Munich ones had shown the Vietnamese to besuperior, Helmke answered that it was one of the reasons. The most important reason for the Vietnamese superiority was the high value placed on education in Vietnamese society. Great effort was expectedfrom students. On the other hand the concept of insufficient talent is unknown in so far as it is denied that there are some students who just cannot make it and cannot be helped by extra support. In Vietnam the teacher takes great care over every student and every student is expected to do his or her best and is assumed to be capable of fine work. This attitude is the same as that promulgatedby the East German education ministry and perhaps many of those teachers who have had to spread out (because of population decline in the East) across the re-united Germany after being trained in theold GDR will to some extent re-invigorate the German education systems of the Federal Republic.

75 Spiewak, M. Viebrierende Pädagogen. Die Zeit 30/2005 downloaded from the internet as a doc. File vile Google Scholar 10/02/2015

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