For 480 years the Johanneum has taught ancient languages to Hamburg’s children. That tradition is about to be disrupted, fears the school’s director, Uwe Reimer. Radical reforms are planned by the city’s government, a coalition of the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) and the Green parties. These would mean ‘humanistic’ gymnasien (academic high schools) like the Johanneum would get two fewer years to impart Latin and Greek. If the reforms are enacted, says Reimer, “the profile we developed over such a long period cannot be maintained.”
The unease goes far beyond the Johanneum. ‘We Want to Learn’, a parents’ movement to stop the reforms, collected 185,000 signatures in November, three times the number needed to force a referendum. Half of Hamburgers want changes to the plans; a fifth think them completely wrongheaded. They will vote next summer unless a compromise is found. Defeat would discourage similar experiments and also traumatise Hamburg’s government, which has been seen as a model for a national CDU/Green coalition one day.
Education keeps Germany in a perpetual state of angst. University students have been striking for weeks over a shortage of teachers, botched curriculum changes and tuition fees. Whenever a state government loses an election, anger over schools is usually a prime cause. Germany is a middling performer among rich countries in international tests for maths and reading. Too few Germans graduate from university. Bright students from low social classes stand little chance. A child from a privileged background is four times as likely to reach a gymnasien, the main route to university, as one with similar grades from a working-class family. In Hamburg his chances are 4.5 times better. A third of 15-year-olds, often immigrants or their offspring, learn too little to get decent jobs.
The Hamburg school reforms seek to help the bottom without hurting the top. They are based on the idea that educational inequality is high in Germany largely because most states decide when a child is only ten what type of high school he or she should go to. Propelled by the Greens, Hamburg’s government wants to extend primary school, where children of all abilities learn together, from four years to six.
“Social distance is diminished when children learn longer together,” says Christa Goetsch, Hamburg’s (Green) education minister. The reform would end parents’ right to pick their high school, because pushy middle-class parents advance their children at the expense of others.
Rather like busing in America, Hamburg’s planned reforms touch middle-class nerves. Mocked by critics as “Gucci protesters”, opponents worry that children will be held back by schoolmates destined to be social and economic laggards and by teachers who cater to their weaknesses. One-size-fits-all schooling will hurt children of all abilities, insists Walter Scheuerl, a lawyer who heads ‘We Want to Learn’. Uncomfortably for Hamburg’s CDU mayor, Ole von Beust, the resisters are disproportionately CDU voters.
(Excerpted and adapted from The Economist)