Problems in German secondary education [1985]

In recent years there is probably no country in Western Europe which has appeared more resistant to the idea of comprehensive education than the Federal Republic. It was largely this that prompted the OECD inspectors to be so critical in their report ¹ which was published in a German version under the suggestive title Bildungswesen mangelhaft (Education system: Poor). The fact that there were so few comprehensive schools – whether of the ‘additive’ or the ‘integrated’ kind – seemed to suggest that the selective system was largely impervious to the social pressures which transformed most of the education systems of West European countries in the 1960s and early 1970s. But it was not so much that Germany was isolated from the social pressures, rather, that the method of coping with them was different.