Wed, 17 Jan 2007

Education symposium calls for diversity in German schools

BERLIN (NNA) - Despite the criticism of the German education system contained in the OECD’s PISA studies, state education in Germany continues to focus on selection rather than support for pupils, a symposium organised by the Software AG foundation at the end of last year under the title “Learning from PISA?” says.

The symposium also highlighted the risk that the PISA studies would be used to justify centralising and bureaucratising tendencies.

With this event, the Software AG foundation was aiming to show that diversity in education was the proper answer to the PISA results. Schools were successful where they had a lot of freedom and were allowed to find their individual profile, Walter Hiller from the foundation told NNA.

PISA coordinator Andreas Schleicher emphasised that the PISA studies required careful interpretation. They could record neither the complete school and personal development of children and young people nor give a comprehensive assessment of individual schools. On the contrary, the value of the studies lay in the comparison with other education systems which illustrated the strengths and weaknesses of the systems in individual countries. Standards as used by PISA had therefore to be understood in the anglo-saxon sense of targets which were defined but which left the individual institutions free to decide how they were to be achieved.

Alternative forms of schooling had been studied in Germany for decades and were being successfully practiced in a significant number of schools, it was emphasised at the symposium. The lack of progress in the German education system was not therefore due to the lack of ideas but to the lack of a transfer of existing ideas into daily school practice.

NNA/end/ung/cva

For full report see “Vielfalt statt Zentralisierung und Bürokratisierung" (5 January 2007) in the German news service (www.nna-news.org/news/de/index.cgi/2007/01/05#070105-02DE_DEUTSCHLAND-PISA-SOFTWARE)

Item: 070117-01EN Date: 17 January 2007

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