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American Women's Club of Hamburg  School Days, School Days ...by Sandra S Originally published in Currents, June/July 2005 Abitur – mittlere Reife – Gymnasium – Realschule – Hauptschule – Gesamtschule – Grundschule – A-levels – GCSEs – comprehensive school – junior school – diploma – high school – middle school – so many different terms on both German and English-speaking terrain for different phases of education. We all send our children to school, but they start at different ages in each country. British children are off to junior school at the tender age of five and finish school twelve years later. American children start kindergarten at five and also follow with twelve years of school, finishing with a high school diploma at the age of 18. German children on the norm are six years old when they start first grade (although many parents/some school authorities recommend keeping a child back a year, having them then enter first grade at seven), and are anywhere from 16 (when they finish Realschule with their Mittlere Reife) to 21 (when they finish Gymnasium, after possibly repeating a year someplace along the line) when they get sent out into the cold, cruel world. In the U.S. education system, everybody is in school for 12 years. For the most part, we’re in the same classes with the same people until we get to high school, when we start branching out into areas of interest. How many years a student in Germany spends in school depends on which direction he/she is sent after four years of elementary school – finishing after 10th grade (Hauptschule, Realschule or Gesamtschule) or 13th grade (Gymnasium or Gesamtschule). At Hauptschulen and Realschulen, the students have all of their subjects together with the other members of their class all the way to the end. At Gesamtschulen, or comprehensive schools, students are divided according to better or weaker abilities in English and math starting in 7th grade but remain together as a class until the end of 10th grade as well. The Gymnasium is traditionally intended for college-preparatory students and again finds students together as a class through 10th grade and then going to something vaguely similar to an American high school course system for grades 11-13. The chart below may help to show what happens in the three countries. The idea behind the three different types of school – Hauptschule, Realschule, and Gymnasium – was that children could be with others of like ability and learn at levels appropriate for them: children learning a trade would not be burdened with Latin and Greek, and college-bound children would not have to plod through home economics and basic math. In the 1970s school reform introduced the first Gesamtschulen with the idea that children would stay together as a class all the way from 5th to 10th grade, and everybody would have an equal chance to develop his/her potential. Here in Hamburg, reforms have been frequent and manifold in recent years. All Hamburg students now have English lessons starting in 3rd grade; physical education lessons for grades 1-10 have been increased from 2 to 3 per week; students at certain elementary schools can start in 1st grade with German and a foreign language (Turkish, Italian, Spanish, for example); some Gymnasien offer bilingual class groups with P.E., geography, history and physics being taught in English; elementary schools are now “dependable” half-day schools, where parents can be certain that their children will be in a learning environment from 8:00 to 13:00 every school day (what it was like previously is a long story!); students in 10th grade (no matter which school form) have compulsory city-wide, centralized written and oral exams in German, math and English; final Abitur exams in most subjects are also now centralized and not written by the teachers at the individual Gymnasien; sweeping changes have been made in school structures, forcing some 20 Hamburg schools to close down in the next 3-4 years; and starting next school year, parents in Hamburg will have the choice between buying their children’s textbooks or renting the books from the school (up to now, books have been, by and large, provided free of charge to all students). I myself went from kindergarten through college in the U.S. and also spent a year here in Germany on a post-graduate fellowship. I have accompanied my three children from elementary school up to their Abitur and starting university classes here in Germany. Both systems definitely have both pros and cons.
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