ABSTRACT
The heart of the liberal worldview resides in the ability to redefine the practical and moral content of equality. The denial of social acceptance premised on origin across the broad sweep of society has profound ramifications in terms of the general discrimination against Germans of Turkish origin. This chapter examines differential outcomes in the German education system with respect to the performance of children of Turkish immigrants relative to the children of native Germans. A legacy of German’s Gastarbeiter program of the 1960s–1970s, Germany’s Turkish enclaves have lagged behind the larger ethnic German population despite residing in Germany for over two generations. This is a reflection of the enduring discriminatory legacy of the German concept of citizenship which, until recently, bestowed full civic equality only upon those meeting a strict ethnic definition of German-ness. One possible solution, detailed here, is the provision of bilingual and multicultural education.
