Homeschooling the German Way

Since we are in Germany for a little I am living the life of a German housewife/mother. Admittedly, I am having some trouble coming to terms with that, even though I know it’s just for the interim.

The last three months the kids and I lived in the States. And while demoted from my former ex-pat status, I was very content. Homeschooling two children and looking out after a third while running a household and being virtually a single mom wasn’t easy but it was a challenge I enjoyed working through because it all made sense and everyone was happy and moving forward.

This, however, stinks. Since homeschooling, as we know it, is illegal in Germany (state officials will knock on your door and eventually take you away in shackles if you keep your kids at home!!) we enrolled the girls in school. A couple of weeks into this bizarre experience we are trying to understand what went wrong in German education.

After the German education system was evaluated in a comparative international study (PISA) some years ago and fared poorly, and way behind the US, state bureaucrats got together and decided that instead of looking toward countries that had come out on top in the study, like Finland, they were going to simply do more of the same – at least in grade school as far as I can tell.

They did not reduce class sizes or assign two teachers per classroom, as is done in Finland. They decided to simply put more pressure on teachers to make the old approach work. That pressure then got passed on from teachers to students in the form of massive amounts of homework. Sound familiar?

Yet, just like when I went to school in Germany thirty years ago, the time in class is spent for the most part on listening to the teacher pontificate on some more or less abstract concept. My kids’ notebooks are curiously blank even after two weeks in school. The workbooks, however, are getting filled at a breath-taking pace, though not in school.

As a matter of fact, homeschooling is alive and well in Germany, because any hands-on work that is being done is done at home. As it is, all that pressure on performance by increasing the amount of homework has fallen to parents, i.e., generally well-meaning mothers, who more than ever before have to hover over their kids in the afternoons, so teachers can make their check marks and assign grades for one of the many tests they now have to administer.

There are two big problems with this approach – apart from the obvious one that drafting once again women for unpaid jobs is unfair!

Problem number one is that this will all but increase the difference in academic performance between children of different socio-economic backgrounds, a problem that already was cited as the most dramatic in the PISA study for Germany.

Problem number two is that it is a grand waste of time. Instead of doing what education should do: entice, encourage, and engage the student, mornings are passed doing…uh, well surviving the classroom experience, I suppose.

As far as I can tell all the enticing, encouraging and engaging is done by me in the afternoons when we all could be doing something else! There no longer is time for music, except in the car, or projects other than filing work sheets in color-coded folders, or for that matter reading something else other than excerpts stitched together in some orange textbook.

It really is sad and if this wasn’t but a short term stint for our family I would probably prefer shackles to this nonsense.

Interestingly, a recent study done by a fellow at Universität Salzburg, Austria, found that excessive homework is ranked as the second highest factor (after low family income) in explaining stress related symptoms in German school-aged children.

But then, that study didn’t hit the international press for weeks on end. What’s on bureaucrats’ budget-obsessed and otherwise distorted minds these days is PISA – and how to fix it the cheap way.