The Third Debacle?

Early this month, 50,000 German university students marched out of their classrooms for day-long demonstrations along the streets of 120 cities and towns. The picket lines had nothing to do with banning the bomb or demanding free speech. Carrying such signs as WHERE IS OUR FAMOUS GERMAN EDUCATION NOW?, the students were protesting the decline and fall of a school system that once was as synonymous with excellence as Swiss watches are in timekeeping. One newspaper called the demonstrations, designed to prod West Germany's two major political parties into pledging their support for better education, "the greatest student initiative since the revolution of 1848."

Basically unchanged since the turn of the century, chronically short-funded, West Germany's educational system is in serious trouble. In a booming economy, the percentage of the gross national product spent on education last year was a low 3.5%. Thousands of farm children still attend classes in old-fashioned one-room schoolhouses; many high schools have neither laboratories nor libraries.

System Strangled. A growing teacher shortage threatens to strangle the entire system. World War II took away many of the young men who would normally have turned to the classrooms. When teachers now in their 50s and 60s begin to retire a decade from now, concludes Philosopher Georg Picht, West Germany will have to persuade 90% of its university graduates to become teachers to fill the gap.

Many Germans are now also questioning the basic structure of the system. Like most European countries, Germany separates its young by exam at an early age (ten), sending the brightest through the rigorous, classics-oriented Gymnasium and on to the university; the rest attend the Mittelschule or the less exacting Volkschule, both roughly equivalent to American junior high schools. Currently, less than 7% of German youths enter the Gymnasium; in France, by comparison, almost 13% attend the equivalent lycee. Many wonder whether so small a number of high-level graduates can provide the intellectual skills to keep Germany's vaunted "economic miracle" on the go.

"Monstrous Abuse." The ruling Christian Democratic Party has repeatedly denied that there is any emergency, and Chancellor Ludwig Erhard angrily dismissed the student demonstrations as a "monstrous abuse." Still, many Germans were sufficiently shocked out of complacency by the protests to study anew the somber statistics cited by Picht, whose book, The German Educational Catastrophe, set off a national debate last year. "If the government and the [state] parliaments fail to act now," he warns, "one can already pinpoint who will be responsible for the third debacle in 20th century German history."

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