Maggie's Farm

The references here to the German educational system are interesting. I'm an American who came to Germany some years back as a soldier, stayed on to get my PhD, and now have 4 children in German schools and universities. For the interested, here's a short user's guide to the German educational system.

Bear in mind that Germany has 16 states, and that there really is no single German educational system, but rather a general German attitude towards education that is administered differently in each of the 16 states. As a rule, the southern conservatively-ruled states have very good systems; the northern socialist-leaning states spend more per pupil and get markedly poorer results.

In Bavaria, where we live, the government spends $6500 per pupil. After the 4th grade, the pupils are divided into 3 groups: Hauptschule, Realschule and Gymnasium. The Gymnasium is the university-prep route, the Realschule prepares for the mid-level clerical jobs, and the Hauptschule is for all the rest.

In principle, the pupils can transfer from one school type to the next higher or lower type. In practice, almost all transfer activity is downwards, because the Gymnasium is too difficult for many. For example, my son was one of 125 pupils who began the 5th grade of the local Gymnasium in the late 1990s. In his 2007 Abitur class (the graduating class of the Gymnasium), there were only 27 pupils.
The remainder had transferred to the Realschule, whence some had transferred once again to the Hauptschule. That was an extreme case, but on the average, fewer than 30% of Bavarian pupils complete the Abitur.

At the Gymnasium a pupil (if he chooses the science/language route) will typically take 9 years of English and 5-7 years of Latin or French. He will become proficient enough to, say, translate verses from Ovid's Metamorphoses into English, and to read Macbeth and Hamlet. Try to imagine American pupils who could read Goethe's Faust (in its original language, of course), or translate Latin verse into German. The pupil will also have 9 years of mathematics, 7 years of physics, and 5 of chemistry, depending on his specialization in his last two years. Additionally, he can expect to have 5 years of religious instruction, which is not intended to convert the pupil but to enable him to visit the Uffizi or study European history with some understanding. Of course, he will also have geography, German literature, physical education, music and art, biology, etc.

Parallel to the Hauptschule/Realschule/Gymnasium axis, there are also vocational schools. They receive their pupils from the Hauptschulen, from which the children graduate after the 9th or 10th grade, and from the Realschulen, which take a year or two longer. These vocational schools are one of the pillars of German industrial success: they are serious institutions with highly-trained and well-respected teachers. Electricians, carpenters, plumbers, auto-mechanics, bank tellers, assistant tax consultants, foreign language correspondents, etc. - they all go through a two or three year training phase at a vocational school,
during which time they will also gain on-the-job experience at a local business or factory.

Most of the successful Gymnasium graduates (Abiturienten) will go to the university. During their university years, the prospective schoolteachers, at least those aiming at the Gymnasium level, are expected to visit many of the same classes as their non-teacher-prep peers. I studied mathematics and computer science, and during the first two or three years many of my classmates were Lehramtskandidaten (teacher candidates). The tests they are expected to pass at the end of their studies are serious mathematics, and one usually finds numerous PhDs (not educational study doctorates, but chemists, mathematicians, physicists, etc.) among the Gymnasium teaching staff.

It is true that German university students are older than their American counterparts. This is because it takes 13 years to graduate from the Gymnasium (most German states have recently reduced this to 12 years), and many freshly graduated pupils spend a year in the military or in a public service position before going off to the university. Most German students do not get a Bachelor's degree; they obtain a Diplom, which is equivalent to a Master's degree.
Also, the university is "free", or pretty much so, with the result that there is not a great deal of financial pressure on
the student to get through it as quickly as possible.

One correspondent mentioned that "MANY technical jobs that are held here in the US by people with BS degrees (or even just HS degrees and tech training) are held, in Germany, by people with PhDs." That is true (the BS degree part, not the HS degree/tech training part), but that's also one of the big differences between, say, BMW and GM. I work for a high-tech company that is headquartered in Germany, and that has subsidiaries around the world, including several in the US. The US workers are primarily technicians who service products that are designed and developed in Munich. Our US branches do have a handful of high-quality engineering and scientific people: they all have PhDs, too, and they're all Chinese.

Without question, the German secondary educational system, at least in Bavaria, is superior to the American model: it's cheaper and it produces a more competent and better educated citizenry. Could the US introduce the German system, or any system that could compete with it? Such a system would, I think, have to separate the children by abilities at an early age, and it would have to take the teaching profession seriously. Once in place, it would be cheaper and more effective than the current American system.
But it would require a great deal of political willpower to implement, and constant vigilance to maintain. It's not going to happen, is it?