Private schools gain popularity in Germany

[Petr]

http://news.yahoo.com/s/csm/20060130/wl_csm/opigtails_1


Private schools take off in Germany

By Isabelle de Pommereau, Correspondent of The Christian Science Monitor
Mon Jan 30, 3:00 AM ET


FRIEDRICHSDORF, GERMANY - When most German pupils are leaving school for the day, students at Rhine Main International Montessori School (Rims) are getting a crash course in English.

That's just one aspect that sets the private school apart from its publicly funded counterparts. Not only do the children have daily English classes; they stay well past midday to participate in drama and sports. For this amount of coaching, parents spend $500 a month, unusual in egalitarian Germany.

"This is the best money you can invest," says Christina von Busse, who hopes to send her two toddlers to the school. "People want a way out of the public system, and Rims is a great way out."

Unlike many countries in the world, Germany has little tradition of private schools. In part because the state set high standards for public schools and the constitution has strict guidelines governing private schools, Germans have tended to view education as a state responsibility. But with an international study in 2000 ranking Germany's prized educational system among the bottom third of industrial nations, parents have become much more open to the private school option.

"There's a breakthrough in mentality. People are not seeing education as a state prerogative anymore," says Lothar Ungerer, the mayor of a town of 20,000 in the former East Germany, which this year replaced a public high school with a private one. "People seem to be saying, 'If I spend money for my child, I'll get quality in return.' And seeing the quality seems to be making people more open."

Since 1995, the number of pupils attending private schools in Germany has climbed 61 percent for primary schools and 25 percent overall, according to German government statistics. And although private schools still only account for only 6 percent of all schools - compared with 60 percent in Belgium, 30 percent in Spain, and 25 percent in France - as many as a quarter of German parents would opt for a private school if one were available to them, says Christian Lucas, president of the German Association of Private Schools in Frankfurt.

"The real boom of private schools happens in the waiting list," Mr. Lucas says. "Helplessness is fueling this growth," says Ingrid von Walderdorff, director of the year-old Rims. She points to the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA), which in 2000 ranked Germany 22nd, 21st, and 21st in reading, math, and science respectively - well behind Britain, Japan, and much of Continental Europe. In the next PISA study, in 2003, Germany did slightly better.

In Berlin, Yvonne Wende's resolve to find an elementary school for her daughter was strengthened by German's poor PISA results. Most public schools that Ms. Wende saw, she felt, wouldn't prepare her daughter for today's global economy.

"Society has changed, but schools haven't adapted," says Ms. Wende. So she created her own dream school, the Berlin Metropolitan School, which opened a year ago with 18 pupils and now has 135. It emphasizes bilingualism and has a day program that includes a science lab and karate. "We're overwhelmed with applications," says Wende.

Perhaps nowhere is the boom of private schools as visible, and controversial, than in the eastern regions where private schools were forbidden only 15 years ago. In Saxony, where population decline has forced 100 public schools to shut down annually over the past few years, Mr. Ungerer, the mayor, fought for his town's public school, so that children wouldn't travel up to two hours to attend school. But when the school did close, Ungerer allowed a private high school that charges $50 monthly for tuition and $90 for afternoon programs to operate from the old public high school's building. "It looks like private schools can react to problems better and faster," admits Ungerer.

Mr. Lucas of the Association of Private Schools concurs, saying private schools can be a catalyst for change in the public school system. But others, like Frankfurt education specialist Manfred Weiss, argue that public schools are starting to improve because they were shocked by the PISA results, not because they're scared that increasingly popular private schools are going to out- perform public schools. As a case in point, Mr. Weiss points to the government's commitment of $4 million to build all-day schools. (Currently nearly all public-school students, even high schoolers, get out by 1:30 p.m.).

Mr. Weiss also says that studies have shown that private schools aren't necessarily better than public ones. Although private-school students tend to do better than public-school students, that may have as much to do with their more privileged social backgrounds as it has to do with the quality of education they're getting, adds Wilfried Bos, director of the Institute of School Development Research at Dortmund University.

Indeed, perhaps nowhere in the industrialized world does the school success of children depend so much on the social background of their parents. Germany's rigorous tracking of pupils into three different school paths, determining as early as age 9 whether they will end up at a university or learn a trade, puts children of immigrants and lower social backgrounds at a disadvantage. The latest PISA study released last fall shows that children of professors are four times more likely to go to a "gymnasium" - the university-track high school - than children of car repairmen.

The private schools cropping up range in cost from a few dollars per month for some Catholic schools to several thousand dollars per month for international schools.

[Jimbo Gomez]

Hitler’s Ghost Haunts German Parents
From the desk of Alexandra Colen on Mon, 2005-08-01 23:35
Of all religious groups Baptists were among the most fiercely persecuted in the Soviet Union. They were not just Christians but they also distrusted the state, preaching an institutional secession from state-run institutions. Many Baptists belonged to the German-speaking minority in Southern Russia and Kazakhstan. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, they emigrated to Germany, the land where their forefathers had originally come from. Today, these Baptist immigrants from Russia, as well as the Low-German Mennonites, are being prosecuted in Germany because they are unhappy with what their children are learning in the German public schools, which they consider too secular. Children are not allowed to opt out of classes or school activities and homeschooling is illegal in Germany since Adolf Hitler outlawed it in 1938.

Last week, a court in Paderborn in the German state of Westphalia ruled that two Baptist couples lose their parental authority over their own children in educational matters. The court said it was interfering “in order to protect the children from further harm.” It stated that the parents had shown “a stubborn contempt both for the state’s educational duty as well as the right of their children to develop their personalities by attending school.” The court appointed the local Paderborn social service as guardian over the children to ensure that they attend public school.

The two couples belong to a group of seven families with a total of fifteen children of elementary school age who do not attend school. The parents were brought to court by the local education board of the county whose director, Heinz Kohler, argued that homeschooling cannot be allowed because it is “a right of the child not to be kept away from the outside world. The parents’ right to personally educate their children would prevent the children from growing up to be responsible individuals within society.” Kohler was backed by the Westphalian minister of Education, the Socialist politician Ute Schäfer, who stated that the obligation to attend a government approved school follows from the “right of a child to free education and maturation.”


Last January, a court in the Westphalian county of Gütersloh sentenced a couple to imprisonent, six days for the mother followed by six days for the father, because the parents had refused to let their children attend a Christmas school play after Grimm’s fairytale “König Drosselbart” (King Thrushbeard), which they considered blasphemous. The prison sentences were demanded by Sven-Georg Adenauer, the Christian-Democrat Landrat (governor) of Gütersloh county, because the parents refused to pay the fine of 150 euros which they had received for not sending their children to the school play.


Upon the conviction Hermann Hartfeld, a Baptist preacher from Cologne who is also an immigrant from Russia, wrote to Adenauer: “These parents did not give in to the intimidations of the Communists. Do you really believe that they will give in to you?” However, Germany’s Christian-Democrats, who are likely to win the coming general elections in September, are as opposed to homeschooling as are the ruling Socialists. The German mentality, even among its so-called conservatives, is very statist. Parents are considered to be incapable of schooling their own children. In this respect the German mentality does not seem to have changed much since the days of Adolf Hitler, when the Germans were expected to look upon the state as a caring parent. Ironically, Sven-Georg Adenauer is the grandson of Konrad Adenauer, the first post-Nazi Chancellor of Germany.


The initiative of the Paderborn Baptists to establish their own private school was rejected by the authorities, who argued that such a school is but a cover for homeschooling and that “the living room is not a class room.” The Baptist families received the support of Hermann Stücher, a 68-year old Christian pedagogue who from 1980 to 1997 homeschooled all his seven children, despite a government prohibition. Stücher runs the Philadelphia School in Siegen, another Westphalian town. The Philadelphia School, which is not recognised by the German authorities, was established to assist homeschooling families. Stücher called upon all Christian parents in Germany to withdraw their children from the public schools which, he says, have fallen into the hands of “neomarxist activists propagating atheist humanism, hedonism, pluralism and materialism.” Manfred Müller, the Christian-Democrat Landrat of Paderborn county, has threatened to take Stücher to court on charges of “Hochverrat und Volksverhetzung (high treason and incitement of the people against the authorities) – a charge which the Nazis also used against their opponents. Müller considers homeschooling to be high treason because “die Schulpflicht sei eine staatsbürgerliche Pflicht, über die nicht verhandelt werden könne” (the obligation to attend school is a civil obligation, that cannot be tampered with).


The total number of homeschooled children in Germany is estimated to be only some 500 in a country of 80 million inhabitants. Unlike in its Western and Southern neighbours, however, homeschooling is illegal in Germany. Last year the police in Bavaria held several homeschooling fathers in coercive detention. They belonged to Christian groups who claim the right of parents to educate their own children, but they are not backed by the official (state funded) churches. Reinhard Hempelmann, a spokesman of the Evangelical Church in Berlin, maintains that the homeschoolers “isolate themselves from the world and the traditional churches.” Alfred Buss, the president of the Evangelical Church in Westphalia, has said that “freedom of religion does not justify opposition against the obligation to attend school.” Six decades after Hitler, German politicians and official church leaders still do not seem to understand what true freedom implies: that raising children is a prerogative of their fathers and mothers and not of the state, which is never a benevolent parent and often an enemy.


The targeted parents are all Christians, whose faith encourages them to act upon their principles, but the fierceness of the authorities’ reaction is telling. The dispute is not about religion (though that alone would be bad enough) but about the hearts and minds of the children. In Germany schools have become vehicles of indoctrination where children are brought up to unquestioningly accept the authority of the state in all areas of life. It is no coincidence that those who have escaped from indoctrination under the Soviets discern what the government is doing in the schools and are sufficiently concerned to want to protect their children from it. What is worrying is that “free-born” Western parents accept this assault on their freedom as normal and regard the Christian parents who want to opt out of the state system with suspicion.

What is one to make of modern-day Germany, a country which happily appoints a former marxist fanatic and condoner of terrorism to the post of minister of foreign affairs but accuses ordinary citizens of treason when they voice concern about what the schools are teaching their children? Clearly they have learned nothing from their experiences with state totalitarianism in the last century.

http://www.brusselsjournal.com/node/139

[tempus fugit]

This is fantastic. Separating education from the government should be the perogative of all nations.

[Jonathan]

This is fantastic. Separating education from the government should be the perogative of all nations.
I disagree.
Government run education(assuming the Government isn't daft) is conducive to a homogeneous national character which produces social cohesion, prosperity, and contentment(well, potentially anyway).
Private education however leaves the education up to different standards and can lead to polarisation of all sorts within a country.

[Jimbo Gomez]

Shane, the point is that present day governments ARE daft.

[Jonathan]

Shane, the point is that present day governments ARE daft.
Tru dat, tru dat.

But I don't think that private education is the answer.

[Ambrosio Spinola]

Its starting also in Spain. People are fed up by the sub par quality of classes given, the increasing violence in classes and the general lawlessness. I used to have classical Latin at 15 years old and Classic Greek at 16. Now they even want to take away Philosophy. This is just a another "white flight" as partents want also to give their offsprings a better chance instead of having them rott away amongst the inmigrant masses.