Why Education is Important For Kids

frackled says:

Well, the “normal” way to get to Gymnasium is to have good grades in the fourth class of elementary school in order to meet the criteria.
As schools differ, as do teachers, my personal opinion is: no, it isn’t very fair. The kids get out of elementary schools on very different levels, and get thrown into a school where suddenly everybody is supposed to know all the grammatically correct specifications for a specific word in a sentence, get on in math, learn a language… which is quite overpowering for one, boring for the next.
Second: kids are thrown together into a class depending on which language they start to learn, not depending on which school they come from or where there grades are. So all types of kids, early achievers, super-clever, the little “my Dad taught me that” and the: I barely made it here are all in one class, which makes it difficult for the teachers to pick them up at one point and get them all to the next level. Plus, those kids are ten. They are not teenagers that might listen if you tell them they need to do more. Nor do many teachers really care. The good ones are their “success” (no matter how much Daddy and Mommy help them at home), the bad ones are “just not good enough material”.
All the above is simply my personal opinion and experience, though.
The process itself has been much discussed publicly, since after the entry into fifth grade, it is very hard to ever cross over into Gymnasium, and many consider a “selection” of – let’s face it – a career and a life path at the age of 10, and your scholarly achievements up to that point, as ridiculously young.
I have to say, I agree with that. I also know, from personal experience, that it is very easy to cross over into lower levels of education, as no particular things like grade average or something needs to be regarded. No counseling teacher or head teacher or whatever will ever approach you to ask if maybe you might want to go into Gymnasium after you finished Realschule or something. They pretty much all know the deals, but you have to come ask them. And virtually no one does, since no one tells the kids that it is possible.
There is another side to it, which is that money for education, and the educational structure are left to every German country – it is not regulated by the Federal government. So, guidelines and rules for crossing over between different schools is different from state to state. Also: Not fair!
Next: The countries right now, like everybody everywhere, are trying to save money, having none in the first place, by cutting down spending. They don’t grant new teacher posts where they are needed, they hardly repair schools, they start wanting money from students in universities (with free education being a right of every German granted by the constitution, and that money not even going to the school the student attends, but to the country, which is free to use it for everything they wish – well, that is kind of going against the grain) … every school, basically, is trying to downsize their apparatus, Gymnasiums all over the country making no exceptions. So while there is a cry of “we don’t have enough people graduating with “Abitur”, and we don’t have enough people going on to study and to get a degree”, there also is the more private battle of every teacher to try to get his Abitur-class to the size of 120( for example) that the school can handle out of his six classes of 34 people each that he starts out with 7 years earlier.
Well, I could go on, but this is a subject that is highly controversial, and very biased. The school system is a little warped, in my opinion, but there are many many individuals resopnsible for it, and what holds true for one school doesn’t for the next.
As to entering Gymnasium: since it depends on the grades, it appears to be a fair process. In a perfect world it would be.
But: the decision is needed and made far to early in a childs development.