How about an educational system that would simultaneously:
We’re doing some of it here and around the U.S. But nothing like other countries.
Australia, England and Scotland are ahead of us. But all English-language countries lag behind their competitors.
Better we look at Brazil, Denmark, France, Japan, Korea, Malaysia, Netherlands, or Sweden. Best of all and the model for most: Germany.
We have local control of K-12 education. In Germany it’s a national and lander (state) undertaking. A constitutional guarantee of equal expenditure per pupil. They have local kreisschulerats (superintendents) but no school boards. Teachers are civil servants with lifetime tenure – and higher pay.
Apprentice-trained workers in all fields have a mastery of both academic subject matter and occupational proficiency. And Germany has roughly twice the proportions in internationally recognized top categories as the U.S. Every student can see the immediate value of academic study – especially the apprentice-bound.
As one report put it, virtually all German apprentices have six years of a foreign language, plus political science and economics equivalent to our community college level.
The result? Higher productivity. Better quality control. Higher wages. Less equipment down time. And a shift of some costs of education to very willing, and fully participating, businesses.
On a flight from San Diego recently I sat next to a German industrialist who’s an enthusiast for the German apprenticeship system.
Neither he nor I suggest the U.S. should – or could – adopt the German system. It’s taken them 200 years to develop. But there are some qualities – and results – worth our thinking about.
Kindergarten starts at age three, not five. It’s free and available to all.
From age six to 10 all children attend a volksschule’s grundschule (similar to our elementary school).
On the basis of students’ performance over half opt for gymnasium (a nine-year classical college-prep school).
The others have three options to age 14: stay in a volksschule’s hauptschule (a vocational-prep high school), transfer to a realschule (a technical school prep program), or a gesamtschule (comprehensive school).
An apprentice’s next step is lehrling (apprenticeship) from age 14 to 17. Originally the parents paid the meister. Now the costs are borne by business and government. The supervising employers must hire meisters skilled in apprentice training.
Each week the apprentices go to berufsschule (apprentice school) one or two days a week and work three or four. The curriculum provides the theory behind their skills. The meister signs off on the weekly report students write about what they’ve learned.
Three years later the apprentice earns a geselle (certificate). It qualifies her to work, but not own a business. Three years as an apprentice, another exam, and she qualifies as meister.
Many Americans resist “tracking.” We’re skeptical of systems that determine a child’s future lifetime by who and where they are at age 10.
But the German system doesn’t do that. It undergoes constant modification. Today there’s the gesamtschule and options for apprentices.
In today’s workplace learning is constant, hands-on skills are academic, and academics are practical.
Some academic standards are more rigorous for apprentices than for the graduate-school-bound. And purely academic studies improve with practical applications.
NASA lost its Mars Orbiter because it failed to translate English measures to metric. The Post Office recalled 100 million stamps that mistakenly placed the Grand Canyon in Colorado. One state’s board of education had to reprint 47,000 posters promoting literacy – because of spelling errors.
Former Secretary of HEW John Gardner observed that a nation that does not value excellence in its plumbers and philosophers soon finds that “neither its pipes nor its theories will hold water.”
Germany has very few leaks these days.
Nicholas Johnson is an Iowa City School Board member.
More information is available on his Web site, www.nicholasjohnson.org.