Essay - Germany by Ida, Sarah, Sebastian

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Created on Tuesday, 13 September 2016 18:47

Written by germany

1. Why is “drop-out” a growing problem for many schools in Europe?

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Are there suitable ways of dealing with this problem?

One would believe that in a more and more globalised society every pupil would try to get at least a moderate Abitur (the last big exams in Germany) in order to be allowed to study at university and thus being able to compete against others in the international job market. However, many students do not seem to share this thinking.

According to a survey carried out by the Dutch “Centraal Bureau voor de Statistiek”, in 2012 there was an average drop-out rate of ca. 12.5% of the 18 to 24-year-olds in all 28 EU member states. In Germany this rate amounted to ca. 11%. The lowest drop-out rate was measured in Croatia (ca. 4%) whereas Spain, with ca. 24.5%, had by far the highest one.

The first question one might think of is why higher drop-out rates are a problem. Education is known to be a fundamental right in our society. Schools do not only pass on the knowledge to their students (most of which you forget anyway) but it teaches them so much more. In school, you learn how to complete a task which might have sounded too hard in the beginning, so you learn not to give up right away. You are taught how to behave towards others, for instance your classmates, it teaches important values and thus has a huge effect on how you think and behave. In Germany, there is a compulsory school attendance until ninth grade. If you want, you can theoretically begin an apprenticeship or even begin to work. However, the jobs that you get with this “degree” will, in very many cases, never lead you to the riches you might have dreamt of. In the worst case the ex pupil decides to nothing and lives with State help. That really is not a sustainable behaviour because you do not pay taxes and thus support the State. If everybody behaved like this, a social state system like the one we have here would not be possible. This would lead to the next problem: There would be an even higher disparity between poor and rich. If a person does not work at all or only earns little money, he or she supports the growing gap between these two extremes. This leads to social distinction; i.e., the formation of different social classes.

It is not hard to see that growing drop-out rates are a problem for the individual States and Europe. But what can be done to minimise this trend? A common reason why pupils drop out of school is because they simply lack motivation. That is a very treacherous attitude because if you are not willing to work for your own education and your future, you probably will not be much more motivated to work for your employer. A way to reduce this would be individual coaching. If a teacher notices that a student does not want to work, he or she should talk to the pupil and offer help. However, the classes (at least in my school) are way too crowded. With sometimes over 30 pupils in one room, there is not much time for individual help. That is why I think that classes should be smaller. That way, nobody could hide behind others but everybody would be – and actually feel – needed.

Another problem I see is that our education, at least in a grammar school, is too theoretical. It is only in Year 11 that we have a compulsory internship of two weeks. Of course, there are pupils who are rather thinkers and some who are ‘doers’, so they are technically skilled. However, the first type of students has a huge advantage. Personally, I think that there should be less teacher-centred teaching but the teenagers should use more of their creativity to understand a certain topic themselves. Also, there should be more excursions because they always show the link to ‘real life’. I do not think that learning several pages by heart for a test is a good way to prove one’s cleverness either. There should be more transfer tasks to train the pupils’ creativity and the ability to use what he or she has learnt in class to solve a more complex problem. All in all, a good mix of theoretical and practical education would motivate both groups of students and reduce the drop-out levels.

One of the worst consequences of more and more students quitting school without a proper degree is that our society becomes ‘dumber’. That sounds very dismissive and I do not want to say that someone who has begun a good apprenticeship after Year 10 is not as clever as someone with a bad Abitur. However, there are simply some basic facts that you need to know as a citizen. Personally, I do not think that you are ready to work after Year 9, so I would extend the period of compulsory education until Year 10. This way it is very hard to drop out of school earlier because it’s actually against the law. Together with more individual help and a fairer share of theoretical and practical education, I could imagine this to reduce German drop-out rates.

- Ida

[Source: https://www.cbs.nl/en-gb/news/2014/05/number-of-school-dropouts-down-in-the-netherlands-and-the-eu]

2. What will tomorrow’s job marked look like?

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Which qualifications are needed?

In the future we will have a big problem with the lack of qualified employees. Because of the demographic change we have less and less young people who can become an engineer. So we will have a big demand of qualified employees. According to this problem we need to think about a solution for this problem. One idea could be to refill this gap with qualified employees from other countries. Many of the refugees are well educated. It could be possible that they can work as an engineer in the country they live in.

The first premise is that the industry wants to employ well-educated people. The second important premise is that the employees are young. Last but not least it is important that the people who will get the job should have as much experience in this work field as possible. To put it into a nutshell: If you want to be the perfect applicant for a job, you have to be a well-educated and young person who has, at the best, 40 years of work experience. But this expectation can never be fulfilled. So we need a solution for this problem as well. In my eyes there is a really good concept in Germany. It is called “Duales Studium“. You can easily explain it with the origin of the word. Dual comes from the Latin word “dualis“ and means “including two“; so a study, in which two things are included. But what is included? One thing goes without saying: the study part. But the other part is that you are in a business where you link your theoretic knowledge to practical insights into the work-life. You study for 3 months, then you are 3 months in the business. These different phases take turns every three months.

In my opinion this is how you can fill the expectations of the industry.

- Sebastian

3. What will be expected of me?

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How can my school help me be prepared for my future work?

“Why do I go to school?” seems to be the one unparalleled questions that inevitably recurs innumerable times during a student’s life. Whether it is a stubborn and defiant Why that a twelve-year-old student asks their stressed out mother repeatedly while stuffing cornflakes in their mouth at the breakfast table, or whether it is a Why that an eighteen-year-old murmurs in a semi-conscious, semi-suicidal fashion when trying to silence the alarm clock with one arm hanging out of the bed desperately trying to tap on top of the clock to make this awful sound that reminds them of their duty ahead of them stop, or whether a Why in-between all of these stages of school (denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance) does not matter. What does matter, in turn, is that it is a question we do not only explore when being a student, but one that accompanies our further life, after all we have to find a job afterwards with school being our only preparatory experience for this, and it also seems most likely that the system of education is as consistent as to make our future children also go to such an institution. Precisely this is why this essay seeks to explore the question of how my school can help me be prepared for my future work and what will be expected of me.

In the wake of globalisation the international job market is ever-expanding. Not only networks of global companies operate in various countries, but, in general, a network of international cooperation in every conceivable field of work has developed. The transfer of goods, of technologies, of tenets sees a world of economic and cultural connection and progress. Yet, on a basic level, the international job market is essentially what all markets are: driven by the economic forces of supply and demand, the societal want to prosper and the human need to develop.

Is that not the ideal breeding ground for the people of our generation who have just attained their a-levels, with long-cherished dreams of the future, when our whole life and the whole world lay ahead? By no means is receiving a position with the chance to fulfil one’s expectations and make a difference on a global job market as easy as the aforementioned, romanticised version of our hopeful perception, yet, nonetheless, it is essentially the ideal precondition for the way most of us have mapped out their future life.

In what way does school, then, prepare us for the long, windy road that slowly becomes apparent after the final exams? The most obvious, and nevertheless a most valuable, prerequisite we acquire during our school career is the command of the English language. A linguistic common denominator is what paves the way for global cooperation in the first place, and it is English that emerged as the lingua franca that serves the aforesaid purpose.

Alongside the usual English classes, the experiences out of the classroom are essential for the development of the language ability, which is why many schools offer various exchange programs with schools abroad. It is not only the linguistic skills and the intellectual capacities which are promoted during the numerous exchanges, but, primarily, the social competence, inquisitiveness and open attitude is improved, thereby gaining substantial knowledge concerning the culture, habits and mother tongue of the country and its people and precious life experience. Thus, on a broader scale, the international exchange and cooperation with roots in the early years of people also helps to destroy stereotypes and to increase unbiased perception.

When leaving for university, students will not miss these exchange possibilities, since modernised global university cooperation offers innumerable chances reaching from a semester abroad via programs such as ERASMUS or an internship abroad to the opportunity to study completely in a foreign country. The ECTS (European Credit Transfer System) facilitates the progress, since credit points can be internationally transferred and accomplishment is thus measurable on an internationally uniform scale.

Apart from the international prospect, there is another way in which our school prepares us for our future life. Even though we are often oblivious to it, we are taught more lessons apart from the ones in a classroom, which is why school can be seen as a school of and for life. For our later life, it is not the input in the various subjects that is most relevant, quite the opposite indeed, it is the life-lessons which are indispensable: Learning how to organise oneself, how to plan one’s week and manage one’s time and the workload, how to manage deadlines, how to deal with pressure and one’s own expectations, being confronted with challenging tasks and situations and learning how to deal with difficult people and authorities – these are only some of the non-subject-related competences we acquire on a meta-level and which train us for the future work-life.

Thus, to conclude, the way in which we are prepared for what the future expects us to be prepared for by school is mostly a subconscious process of acquiring demanded abilities, which reach from professional to social competences and are essential no matter in what field we seek employment later on. With these skills at hand and the foot on the threshold to a globalised and cooperating world the road ahead of us is still not an easy one, but one as easy it can get.

- Sarah

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