New Educational Chances for the Disadvantaged Migrant Youth through Reconstruction of Social Capital in Online Informal Learning

Abstract

The educational disparities of migrant youth, as a persistent problem in Germany, have been revealed again by the dissatisfactory PISA results (OECD 2000/2004). The lower level of educational performances achieved by migrant youth in PISA explicitly indicates the underlying structural inequality of the German formal educational system – the three-levelled school system – that is not only vertically stratified but also ethnically segmented (Diefenbach 2003/2004). The migrant students are always strongly separated from the German peers in their educational career, as demonstrated by Diefenbach (2003-04). For instance, the youngsters with migration background more often attend the “Hauptschulen” – the lowest level secondary schools with less favourable conditions – than the German students (OECD 2000/2006). An ethnic differentiation therefore has been emerging between the migrant youngsters and the native peers in the more or less German-non-German separated milieus. As a result, the migrant young people, even though many of them were born and have passed through their whole school career in Germany, obviously achieve lower educational performances than their German peers (Stanat 2003; Diefenbach 2003-04, 2004; Prenzel Baumert a. o. 2004). Clearly, the milieu-specific (Vester 2004) social origin of the migrant youngsters is closely related to their chances of access to and participation in the stratified formal educational processes. In respect of this, such a hierarchic and segmented formal educational system plays a critical part in not only producing educational inequalities but also reproducing the social inequality structures (Kessl/Otto/Treptow 2002).