Educating Germany

When co-ordinating a blog like this you get the privilege to 'meet' people who remind you of who you are trying to help. Many are not able to be open about their experiences, their family, their situation etc, but a few will share their hearts and minds with you - usually when they have nothing to lose anymore by being overseas.

One such family agreed to write about their reasons for home educating, for leaving Germany, and what there lives are like now.

This mother and son are separated long-term from the father and daughter, living in 2 separate households, 2 totally different lives, in two very different cultures.

I expected a happy-ever-after ending, after all they are now free to facilitate their child's learning, but what I did not consider was the impact that the decision to emigrate has on all the other facets of life. Its almost as if the choice made for freedom in education brought life sentences or sacrifices in other areas.

As you read please try to feel the emotions and put yourself in their shoes.

We differ in many ways from the religious and pedagogic cases, since we do not plead parental rights but the child's right to education (which is anchored in the supplementary protocol of the European Declaration of Human Rights and the UN Declaration of the Rights of the Child, as well as the Bavarian Constitution and the German Basic Law).

We have been home educating our child for the past two years, i.e. since the middle of 5th grade. The situation at the time was such that J. threw up at night, constantly complained about headaches and didn't want to go to school any more. The external situation was that he was fighting for passing grades in language arts at the Hauptschule [labor track school] despite his former admittance to the Gymnasium [academic track prep school]. His interests were not reciprocated by the other children or the teachers. A number of IQ tests showed that the distribution of his skills and gifts was very inconsistent and that school had always built on skills that he was devastatingly bad at, instead of using his talents and furthering them. One striking example is writing, especially also English and other foreign languages (the inevitable F in English was one of the major reasons why J. switched from Realschule [administrative track school] to Hauptschule, and foreign languages in general were the reason why we did not choose to send him to the Gymnasium. Even math was one of the affected subjects.

We have an assessment from the Landesarzt [official state physician] in charge, the chief physician at the child psychiatry in Würzburg, that clearly states that our child is extraordinarily gifted but dyslexic. It further states that school has rendered him sick (depression, school anxiety) on account of his constant experiences of defeat and failure and that he, aside from therapy for his dyslexia, is in need of appropriate individual support in his education. It states that our child considers family-supported education an ok solution (which was confirmed during a conversation with the hospital's chief psychologist in the absence of both parents) and that it should be determined, in collaboration with the school officials in charge, whether home education could be a possible solution.

We have records of three conversations with the Sprengelschule, the school responsible for J.'s education. These records make it clear that the people we talked to do not see the need or the possibility to go beyond their usual approaches to address J.'s difficulties (stating they weren't trained for that!), since he was not in danger of failing the grade. Note: At a Bavarian Hauptschule, a student can pass a grade with three marks of "five" - those can be in any subject, except for PE - as long as the marks average out to a passing grade of "four". A "six" is counted as two "fives". [Translator's note: the German grading system goes from 1 to 6, with 1 being maximum and 4 being the minimum mark for passing. 5 and 6 are both failing marks.] So, it is possible to pass the grade and receive a diploma with "fives" in German, math and English, or a "six" in English and a "five" in German, as long as that can be balanced out by a single "one", for example in arts, and "fours" in all other subjects! The special ed teacher put it like this: The basic responsibility of students at a Hauptschule is not learning how to read and write and to learn math and English but to be there at all, to arrive on time and bring his or her school supplies.

The principal accepted the assessment as a sick note and worked out a model, in collaboration with the municipal school psychologist and the head of the Aschaffenburg school board, according to which J. remained a student at the school, I taught him in the common room, which stood empty in the morning, and he only participated in 8 courses a week with his school mates (PE, and crafts and the like). This only lasted for two weeks, though. After that, Würzburg intervened and categorically prohibited this arrangement without responding to our objections. They said it was the school's responsibility to teach the child; that the assessment didn't state that J. wasn't able to go to school and if we wanted a different arrangement, we'd have to provide a different medical assessment.

An exchange of letters ensued between us and the school officials. We explained that it would be wonderful if the school assumed the responsibility for J.'s education so far and that we felt his dyslexia was as congenital as the asthma attack of a person with allergies to strawberries. He had undergone countless medical, psychological and remedial/special pedagogical tests since second grade and nothing was ever detected beyond his incoherent distribution of skills and gifts. We said it just happened to be that the current curriculum constantly builds on his weaknesses instead of developing his strengths and using them to help him acquire basic skills like reading, writing, math and English. This, we said, leads him to constantly find himself in a mixture of being overextended and underchallenged. He's being praised for things he's been able to do for years and fruitlessly struggles with others. In trying to fulfill the immediate tasks, he develops compensational strategies that are useless for and even counterproductive to the desired skills. The result is that after some initially acceptable or even good grades, the whole thing topples down like a house of cards. The only thing he learns this way is that success and failure are not controllable. We explained that J.'s weaknesses are not medically relevant according to physicians' assessments, since they do not affect him in daily life. Doctors cannot determine whether these weaknesses effectively hinder his learning according to school philosophy, since they test for illnesses and not learning prerequisites for current teaching philosophies. We stated that we had sent a healthy, intelligent, well socialized, assiduous, educated, well-fed, physically fit and adequately dressed child to school, a child that has not been distracted by too much television, and four years later, we got back a sick, despairing child that could not read or write, didn't stand a chance to learn English, didn't even understand a lot of first grade math, a child that was simply not seen or taken seriously because all this was hidden behind some different, good skills. We also said that as long as the school was not willing to provide us with a teaching model that would not teach right past him in the future, we considered his absence to be excused.

The officials' answers succinctly stated that this was no excuse to keep J. from attending school and that it was our duty to send him there.

As further evidence, we have J.'s school readiness test and several of his work sheets from first grade that show that he is lacking the prerequisites for school, that in the former GDR, tests would have confirmed this before the beginning of first grade, that J. was an at-risk child, but that in Bavaria in 2001 this was not tested for and thus he was considered to be ok. We have a report from the principal, where she explains the issue from her point of view and mentions the state-wide math test at the beginning of 6th grade, which J. participated in because this was during the time when I was teaching him in the school room. She writes that this test illustrated our concerns: J., she said, had received a "two", even though he could not multiply, divide or solve an equation on paper - the parents were not concerned about grades but about content.

During our misdemeanor trial in the fall of 2007, we referred to article 16 OWiG [German Misdemeanor Law] and explained that at the beginning of our home education efforts, J. wasn't able to read and comprehend a detective story at the second grade level. In the meantime, he was reading age appropriate novels. We asked if it was a crime to teach one's own child to read. The trial was postponed and the proceedings against me and my husband were dropped in the spring of 2008.

The school officials, however, filed a motion for compulsory schooling. They did not refer to the compulsory schooling law (article 118 BayEUG [Bavarian Educational and School Law]) but to article 119 BayEUG, according to which it constitutes a misdemeanor to keep a child from school without permission. They threatened to sue us for a penalty payment of 2000 Euros due to a misdemeanor according to article 7 LstVG [State Penal Law and Admisitrative Order Act] if I didn't send J. back to school. Since this fell into the time when we were also in probate court, J. went back to school about three weeks before Christmas (back into sixth grade - he had not passed that grade since he had shown no accomplishments during the 2006/2007 school year). We unregistered at the town hall and packed our bags.

Since then, J. and I have lived in England; my husband stayed behind in Germany. He brings home the bacon, takes care of the house and is there for our grown-up daughter who is currently doing a year of social services after her graduation from the Gymnasium. It's not clear yet what will happen next - after our defeat in the administrative court, our goal is an English GCSE, rather than a German external diploma. We could apply for British citizenship after living here for five years, if education at a German school were to be considered an absolute necessity for integration into German society!

Legally, we refer to the child's right to education (a basic education is necessary for participation in society) and to equal treatment (other children are allowed to learn using the offered courses). (Maybe we could also add "physical inviolability".) The main question is: Is the state entitled to force a child to participate in an education that is basically incapable of allowing him or her to learn what is supposed to be learned through it? And what options do parents and children have in our country to ascertain the basic rights mentioned above?

All this does not keep the court from brushing us off using the same old phrases from religious cases, instead of addressing our arguments.

Let's review:

It is not the teachers' responsibility to teach our kids, but to implement the curriculum and to hand out, according to the curriculum, all sorts of work to be graded. It is irrelevant if the child develops sustainable strategies in order to fulfill the tasks; there is also no investigation as to why children make certain mistakes and why they fail. Teachers are basically autistic by occupation: their teaching does not address anybody and the grading follows formal criteria while the teacher aims for a normal distribution around grade "three" (satisfactory). The dead stock is being handed down (no promotion to the next grade, transfer to a lower school). Failure is thus institutionalized.

This way, some children fail simply because of an incompatibility of their skills and gifts with the curriculum: among the cases that we sent on to the officials was a student of psychology who could read and write flawlessly. However, even as an adult, she did not possess the skills that are nowadays required by the Ministry of Education as a prerequisite for learning how to read and write. This student had failed in the British school system but learned to read at home while being educated by her family.

In Germany, however, curriculum designers and teachers have the right to force children into an education that is basically incapable of allowing him or her learn what is supposed to be learned through it - all within the scope of "Equal Education for All". (The Bavarian State Secretary of the Ministry of Education, who we approached with our painful situation during an election rally in 2003, literally said: we can't please everybody.) And if parents try to supply adequate schooling that could offer a demonstrably gifted child a better education than a poor Hauptschul-diploma with a certificate of dyslexia, this is being considered a marginalizing endangerment of the welfare of the child and is unconstitutional. It is not considered relevant that the state physician at the child psychiatry attested that the child was cognitively marginalized anyway and that it is to be feared that due to his lack in education, he will also be socially marginalized in the future. That's what psychotherapy, paid for by DSS, is for.



It is not forbidden to produce a parallel society of functioning illiterates. After all, somebody has to work for minimum wages, and children should get used to their place in life early on!!! THAT is what welfare of the child is according to Germany.

Thanks to a fabulous anonymous translator for the work on this piece. Ich weiss es zu schatzen!

[Original German document available upon request.]