Comprehensive Schooling: an evaluation—West Germany

Abstract

Compared with Britain and Sweden the practical experience with comprehensive schools in West Germany has been rather short; as an English correspondent recently rightly put it, West Germans are just dipping toe in [1]. From about 1960 many politicians, educationists and other interested groups did a lot of thinking about what a comprehensive school was or was not, what it could be, should be, and so on; they became entangled in intensive ideological controversies. A huge volume of articles, papers, books, expert opinions and plans was produced before the first comprehensive schools began to work in West Berlin in 1968. Numbers soon went far beyond the limit of 40 experimental schools which the Deutsche Bildungsrat had recommended in 1969 in one of its rare moments of unanimity [2]. Up to 1976 156 comprehensive schools were set up in the Federal Republic, including West Berlin. Since that time there has not been any marked progress: public opinion and party political pressure enforced a go-slow and an evaluation of existing schools before establishing many new ones. In 1979/1980, there were 178 comprehensive schools in existence in the 11 Lander, the independent states of West Germany which control education. Neatly following party-political lines, more than one third (65) are concentrated in Hessen, 32 in North-Rhine-Westphalia and nearly the same number (28) in West Berlin, Lander which have long been governed by (leftwing) Social Democrats, sometimes in coalition with the Liberals. The (right-wing) Christian Democratic or Christian Socialist states 'on the fringe', for instance Schleswig-Holstein in the North, Rhineland-Palatinate in the West and Bavaria in the South still have only two or three comprehensives each. To these 178 comprehensive schools there may be added another 175 schools which would rather be called 'multilateral'. Together they take not yet 16% of the secondary school population on average for West Germany. This proportion is naturally much higher in some of the states: it reaches 25% in West Berlin and more than 40% in Hessen. Hessen is famous in one other respect: it provides the one and only fully comprehensive area with 12 comprehensives in a rural district around Wetzlar.