Germany

While at the surface, it seems that the sociology of education in Germany has had a simple task in front of it, at least insofar as the old tripartite system correlates to dominant imaginations of German social structure, this is simply not the case. Germany’s education system, like India’s, has undergone fairly dramatic changes recently, although these changes are of a much different character from India’s. Perhaps it is the case that the container model of society, with “objective” categories of social class, made sense because of its correlation to the education system. A novel imagination of society was not necessary, because the education system faithfully reproduced static social positions. This idea, however, obscures two important notions: first, that the education system was based on a functionalist view of

127

society, a view which has had less to do with humanistic orientations toward individuals and more to do with social control; and second, that the rationalization of the education system, and of society in general, embodied a misunderstanding of how society works, namely complexly. The sociology of education in Germany has for the most part and with difficulty adjusted to this newly “discovered” complexity. Perhaps it has become all too apparent that the meritocratic sorting of small children onto different educational tracks is a bad idea. This impulse to retain a system which can really only be justified along the intellectual lines of the late-19^th Century is what is meant by educational conservatism.

Rolf Becker and Wolfgang Lauterbach (2010), for example, in attempting to answer their own question as to how social inequalities brokered via the education system and codified as “educational chances” can persist in spite of increases in opportunities in the education system, come to this clause: “Education is not only a formal resource, realizable in the context of human capital as it relates to the labor market, but is rather a decisive requirement for many different opportunities in life” (13; translated by author). Connecting this idea to Helmut Fend’s (2012) “third function” in education (see 4.2.), hegemony – or power or violence – determines these opportunities in life. Critical studies of the reproductive functions of the German education system are relatively few and far between, meaning this notion of hegemony is left untouched in favor of functionalist approaches, often rendered in different terms (rational choice, for example).

The immeasurability of hegemony, power and violence seems to result in a reluctance to take such things seriously in the sociology of education, creating a chasm in the field between those who mobilize Bourdieu’s notions of violence, for example, and those who dismiss them as something akin to psychobabble in favor of seemingly innocuous concepts like “attainment” and/or “achievement” (for example, Esser 2016). Such analyses serve the function of naturalizing the status quo (educational conservatism), whereby pupils are sorted into different school forms after the fourth grade, by providing evidence for the idea that lifelong scholastic attainment and achievement can be predicted on the basis of a combination of a teacher’s recommendation and the parents’ wishes. The idea that some pupils are simply born more intelligent than others is not exactly wrong, but the emphasis on an evaluation of intelligence at such a young age flies in the face of what the scientific community has come to understand about neural development, for example, namely that neural formation

128

(adolescence) does not end until an individual is well into his or her twenties (Johnson, Blum and Giedd 2009: 216-217).

The impulse to provide social scientific justification for the sorting function of German secondary schools is certainly widespread, but there are other viewpoints which help to round out the extant understandings of the sociology of education in Germany.

Comparative studies within Germany – meaning between the Bundesländer – depict a more nuanced situation than the “the system works and this is why” approach. Such studies reflect a welcomed degree of reflexivity. Marcel Helbig and Rita Nikolai (2015), for example, compare the evolution of schools within Germany’s respective Bundesländer since 1949, with an emphasis on differential access to different school forms, observed through the lens of educational inequality. Their thesis, that varying levels of access to educational opportunities and certificates across the Länder lead to the unequal distribution of life opportunities (15), is premised on the idea that inequality between Länder in this regard can be deduced from each Land’s social composition. Their overall analysis, however, is critical, as they underscore time and again the need to ensure “equal educational opportunities”, something which can only happen subsequent to the working out of the differing problem areas in each Land (16). The book aims to understand differential inequality within Germany in order to overcome it, to allow the school system to provide equality of opportunity for pupils. This equality of opportunity can only be realized if meritocratic sorting is significantly postponed.

Ullrich Bauer et al (2014) approach the evolution of the German education system from a different perspective, seeing the pervasiveness of neoliberalism (in the guise of individualization) as an imminent threat to social democracy and attempting to analyze changes to secondary schooling as stemming from a redefinition of (objective) class categories and roles. The point of departure is, roughly speaking, the idea that the political-economic regime had changed and ipso facto this change influenced education and the formation of social class. For them, the expansion of the education system has done little to decrease educational inequalities, on the basis that the expansion was coupled with neoliberal strategies, including deregulation and liberalization (13). The causal relationship between changes to political economy, to the social structure and, ultimately, to education is not exactly convincing; more interesting for the purposes here is the correlation between them.

129

Changes to the political economy in Germany, and the changes they bring to bear on social structure, are not coterminous or really even logically connected with changes to education. This is not to say that education is independent of other economic and political considerations; rather, the interaction between education, economics and politics is farraginous to such a degree that attempting to draw convincing causal connections between the three can only lead to a misunderstanding of how change does and can take place. This is to say that meaningful change can only take place via the circumvention or outright abandonment of educational conservatism.

This imagination of the connection between political economy and education tinges to varying extents other approaches to the sociology of education. The Hans Böckler Foundation, an umbrella organization for trade unions, for example, publishes studies about the ways in which education and the world of work comingle to produce the given social structure. The preoccupation with equality of opportunities and education is most certainly a noble one, but the research interest is oriented toward harmonizing the education system with the labor market, a herculean task even absent vital epistemological considerations. In one of the foundation’s studies, Solga and Dombrowski (2009) attempt to conceptualize reproduction via education by focusing on correlations between parental occupation and educational attainment levels and the schools their progenies attend (14). This correlation has been established over and over across time and space and need not be described anew here.

More interesting are the mechanisms which arbitrate the connection between “inputs”

and “outputs”. The “inputs” or determinants identified in the study are three-fold: social class, migration background and gender; the “outputs” or dimensions which lead to inequalities in educational success, are also three-fold: competencies, certificates/diplomas and types of schools visited. Providing the connection between the two are the aforementioned mechanisms which are more or less the social processes determining social inequalities (Solga and Dombrowski 2009: 11). One gets the feeling that such studies view the problems of inequality in education and the reproduction thereof as stemming from a disharmony between the labor market and the education system, a disharmony which is not a permanent condition but is rather a policy problem needing to be solved. This obscures the fact that the reproduction of inequalities is endemic to the system and is not merely a byproduct of the changing world of work, mode of production or mode of accumulation.

130

As is the case with the sociology of education in India, a focus on transitions between different levels of schooling perhaps paints a more accurate portrait of the ways in which social inequalities are reproduced via education. Because Germany has multiple school forms subsequent to the primary level, transitions are much more difficult to conceptualize, a point which is adequately reflected in this diagram:

(from Schneider and Tieben 2011: 144) For Schneider and Tieben (2011), the early and formalized sorting function between primary and lower secondary are inconsequential compared to the transition between lowery secondary and upper secondary:

The transition from lower to upper secondary education thus contributes to the overall social inequality in educational attainment in Germany, over and above the inequality brought about by earlier (from primary to lower secondary education) and later (from upper secondary to tertiary education) transitions (160).

This is the case in spite of the emergence of different alternatives within both upper secondary and lower secondary education. From the diagram above, it seems that at both levels the principle of expansion might have offered more possibilities for those pupils who did not fit into the old tripartite secondary school categories. That this is not the case, that the pressures from sorting have simply shifted upwards (in age and grade) for the pupils without alleviating the problems associated with reproduction, speaks to a larger point about tracking in education. Expanding the tripartite system and allowing for more “parallel” tracks has not solved the problem of reproduction via education; in fact, the inverse is the case, which suggests the notions of tracking and egalitarianism are inimical to each other.

131