by Sara Zaske
After the trip, Sophia’s school life was underway in earnest, but that still meant half days of instruction interrupted by several recesses and a lengthy lunch. I studied her schedule, which seemed to have an awful lot of freiarbeit on it. This “free work” was first conceived by kindergarten founder Fröbel, and the educator Maria Montessori picked the idea up and expanded on it in her method of teaching.
At our school, there were only a few sessions a week with the classic “sage-on-the-stage” type of instruction, in which a teacher stands up in front of the class and lectures while students sit and listen. In Montessori, children had a small amount of direct instruction and were then left to play with materials designed to help them learn literacy and math concepts. They also had workbooks to fill out and tests, but each child finished these at his or her own pace.
Sophia’s class was a mixed-grade class of first through third, so there was some flexibility in when a child had to learn a certain concept. The mixing of ages also helped the children learn from each other. This is not particular to Montessori schools; many elementary schools in Berlin combine at least the first two grades of elementary school.
The length of instruction was also fairly common. While many German elementary schools are moving toward full-day instruction, half-day schools are traditional. Ours was a combination. The school advertised itself as a “reliable half-day school with open-all-day service.”
Like the majority of kids in her class, Sophia went to hort after formal instruction ended. Hort is after-school care, and it was held in the same school building. Hort occupied several rooms inside where the kids could play, including one for crafts, one devoted entirely to Legos, and a kuschelraum, a cuddly room for quiet reading. After instruction was over, the kids checked into hort in these rooms, but after some time, all of them would go outside to the school’s hof (“yard”). Sometimes, the instructors would organize special activities, but mostly the children were free to play whatever they liked.
When I came to pick Sophia up, I often had to go searching for her among the variety of playground structures, including swings, slides, trampolines, a large wooden boat, and a three-story tower. On the edge of the yard was a small natural area of trees and large bushes. Here, the kids would play things like chase, hide-and-seek, and other made-up games, mostly out of sight of the hort instructors. It was among this small piece of planned wilderness where I most often found Sophia after school.
Despite the big event of einschulung, I didn’t see how first grade was dramatically different than kita for Sophia. While she had some classroom instruction, the majority of her day was still play. Needless to say, this worried her American parents some.
Educational Priorities
We hadn’t listened entirely to Sophia’s kita teachers. We taught Sophia to read, in English, before school started. Since she was going to a German school, we figured she needed a head start on English. Not being teachers, Zac and I used a cheesy-sounding but effective book called Teach Your Child to Read in 100 Easy Lessons. The anxiety American parents have around early learning was clear from the many titles in this category. If you believed all the claims, you could apparently teach your child to do anything at any age. There was even a book that said you could teach your baby to read and do math.
Many Germans are concerned about their children’s academic achievement as well. Traditionally, students in Germany are separated by ability in fifth grade, with an upper track for students destined for university, a middle track, and a vocational track. This system has become more flexible with the introduction of new comprehensive schools; however, once placed on a track, especially if it’s the lowest track, a child would have a hard time moving up. Those are some high stakes, very young, but even this looming division did not make parents at our school want to push their first graders too hard.
I was struck by this attitude at a meeting for first-grade parents. Sophia’s class was large, with twenty-seven kids total, spanning three grades, seven of whom were first graders. So for this meeting, nearly twenty parents met with the teacher, Frau Schneider, and her helper, an erzieherin (“instructor”) named Frau Müller. I remember Frau Schneider saying that some children might not master reading right away, not even by the end of the first year. “Don’t worry,” she assured us. “They will all learn to read eventually.” To my surprise, most of the parents nodded their heads in agreement.
Despite the apparent lack of intensity at this level, Germany is not a country that takes education lightly. You cannot do a job in Germany without proof of some formal training in that field. People with university degrees are highly respected, and a doctorate is considered necessary for most political positions.
The German education system seems effective when compared with the other thirty-five first world countries in the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). In the 2012 Programme for International Student Assessment, or PISA, German fifteen-year-olds performed well above average in reading and math, ranking among the top fifteen OECD countries in 2012 in both categories—and higher than their American peers, who were below average, ranking seventeenth in reading and twenty-seventh in math. So if success is measured only in terms of math and literacy skills, the Germans have it, even with their slower approach to elementary school.
Like in the United States, German primary schools have undergone a great deal of reform, and in 2004, national standards were set for math, German, and foreign language. This move sounds similar to the U.S. Common Core standards (minus the foreign language), which focus on math and English skills, but the German schools have goals beyond just two subjects.
According to the government’s online school guide, German primary grades should focus on “the development of self-learning strategies and skills, children are encouraged to learn by experience and interaction with their environment.” This statement puts the child at the center of her own learning, with an emphasis on fostering independence in the process. In contrast, the U.S. Common Core talks only about what children need to learn, not about how they learn it, and as its critics have noted, the heavy testing involved leads to an emphasis on worksheets and direct instruction, not on children developing their own investigative process of learning.
Much of what is taught in German schools is overseen by each state or province, which in German is confusingly called a “land.” I looked up the standards for the metropolitan area of Berlin, which is its own “land,” and saw that Berlin has standards not only for math and German, but for history, geography, natural sciences, politics, art, music, languages (English and French), social studies, sports, and traffic and mobility education.
Given the few hours of the traditional half-day school, I had to wonder how all this fit into such a brief day of instruction. The short answer is that it didn’t, not for first graders anyway. Many of the subjects are introduced slowly through the grades, and some subjects, such as politics, are only taught in the last year of elementary school. Still, you would be hard-pressed to find many U.S. states that push their public primary schools to teach such a wide range of subjects, even to fifth graders.
In Germany, the schools have some flexibility in how they arrive at teaching students these tasks. For instance, our school used projects to promote learning, similar to the way Sophia’s kita did. While the school, rather than the kids, picked the themes, the students did have the opportunity to explore a topic incorporating subject skills in the process. During Sophia’s first year, the school projects had elemental themes: air, fire, and water. So, for example, during the air project, students learned the math and science around flight, they read stories about air travel, and they studied birds. At the final stage, the kids were split into working groups that spanned all grades, and each group made a sculpture of a flying machine or animal—which could be real or imaginary. The results were hung in the hallways—giant hot air balloons, fanciful rocket ships, and strange unicorn-birds.
I helped out on the day the scu
lptures were created in what was essentially a school-wide papier-mâché project. Glue, colored paper, and sticky kids were everywhere. Still, the children were invested and engaged in the projects. Most of the kids had strong feelings about how things looked, or who got to make or paint which part. Each group had a fifth grader as a leader, and kids of all ages had to figure out how to work together.
These skills, leadership and teamwork, are a central part of the curriculum. The Berlin standards included not only a list of facts children should know about a given subject but also a number of “competencies” that sounded more like what a business guru might call “soft skills.” For instance, the math standards stated that first graders should learn addition, subtraction, etc., on up to such things as prime numbers in fifth grade—but the math standards also called for learning “social skills,” such as communicating reasoning to others, and “personal skills,” such as the ability “to take responsibility for their own learning, to critique their own results and process the criticism offered by others.” Each subject had similar goals. By placing these skills at the center of every subject, the Berlin system seemed to recognize a critical truth about education and growing up: children need more from school than math and literacy skills; they need to learn how to become responsible, thoughtful people.
Homework, Food, and Protest
Despite the emphasis on responsibility, Sophia’s school didn’t assign much homework. In fact, in first grade, she had none. I knew homework would be coming because I heard the parents of third graders complain about the amount of hausaufgaben in yet another parent meeting. At our school, each class had its own type of PTA. We had elected officers and took votes. We also had multiple meetings with the teacher as an entire class, by grade, and one-on-one. All in all, the parents had a lot of opportunity to ask questions and give feedback to the teacher.
At this meeting, the issue was not about the amount of homework; many parents felt their kids shouldn’t have any at all.
“It interferes with family time,” one mother complained.
“If my son wants to play sports or take music lessons, then there is no time at all,” a father said.
Frau Schneider deftly handled this problem by making sure there was enough time set aside in hort for the students to complete their homework before they got home. Her helper, Frau Müller, also worked as a hort instructor and was on hand at the meeting to assure the parents that the homework would get done.
It worked well. Sophia started getting some homework in second grade and more in third grade, at least three times a week, but I never saw a piece of this hausaufgaben actually done at our haus.
This is how it should be done according to Armin Himmelrath. A German journalist who often writes on education topics, Himmelrath called for an end to homework in his 2015 book: Hausaufgaben? Nein Danke! (“Homework? No Thanks!”). It set off a great debate among German educators and parents. Most German primary schools assign homework, and in greater amounts than our school in Berlin did. Homework is a long entrenched tradition, one which Himmelrath discovered goes all the way back to the 1400s.
Yet, according to the science, we shouldn’t be assigning any homework in elementary school at all because it has no proven benefit. This is not the finding of one study alone, but of the vast majority of the research on the topic. Duke University psychologist Herbert Cooper led a review of 180 scientific papers published from 1987 to 2003 on the subject and found no strong correlation between doing homework and academic achievement in elementary school. There was some correlation in higher grades, but any benefit is lost after more than two hours of it.
The research Cooper reviewed was all conducted in the United States, and the German journalist Himmelrath found similar evidence in Europe. He pointed to the Swiss canton of Schwyz, where homework was abolished for four years in the 1990s. During that time, the performance of Schwyz students was compared with students in another region. The only difference researchers found? The children without homework were more motivated and less stressed. This should make sense to any parent who has had to push their reluctant children to do their homework. No one feels good about being forced to do anything. It does not exactly give them a warm, fuzzy feeling about school and learning.
Himmelrath also argues that homework exacerbates inequality. If a child hasn’t understood a topic in school, she’s unlikely to figure it out at home all by herself—which gives a distinct advantage to children from more privileged backgrounds who have educated parents with the time to help them over those who do not. Himmelrath said the best way to resolve this inequity was to have “homework” done in school, with an instructor nearby who can help—which, lucky for us, was exactly what was happening in our school.
The hort homework solution pleased the parents in our class, but some were much less pleased about other aspects of the school—namely, the food. No other issue was discussed more often and at greater length than the contents of the lunch menu: the food wasn’t nutritious enough, there weren’t enough choices, or it wasn’t “bio” (organic). I watched these discussions with mild amusement. They didn’t know how good they had it.
German food has a negative stereotype. People think it is all heavy sausage, potatoes, sauerkraut, and schnitzel. It’s true Germans love these things, but I found greater variety and more healthy choices than I expected in restaurants and in schools. I was quite pleased by the school’s lunch menu, which was light-years beyond the soggy hamburgers and tater tots from the school cafeterias I had known as a child. Yet I understood why the parents were concerned. None of the children brought lunch to our school. They had to eat what was served in the cafeteria.
Traditionally in Germany, lunch is the biggest meal of the day, as it is in many European countries. At Sophia’s school this meant it was always a hot dish: casseroles and goulash, soups and pastas, and, yes, plenty of potatoes in all their varieties: fried, boiled, and mashed and pureed into a soup. Students always had a choice of vegetarian or meat entrée. Sometimes there were even special “sweet” lunches of German pancakes with applesauce or milchreis, a milky rice pudding usually served with cherries, but these were rare treats, not daily items. Notably, they never served chips, pizza, or chicken nuggets. Every once in a while, they did serve wurst (sausage). We were in Germany after all.
I liked the school cafeteria. For one, it meant I didn’t have to pack Sophia a lunch, although I did pack her a small snack in her brotdose that she ate in class as a type of second breakfast around ten a.m. every day. Second, having to eat in the cafeteria forced Sophia to try new things. Of course, she loved the sweet stuff, but she also became used to eating vegetables she might otherwise have rejected. For instance, she informed me once that she really liked krautsalat, a cold cabbage salad, like coleslaw except without the mayo.
When she invited her best friend, Maya, over one afternoon, I asked the seven-year-old what her favorite meal was. I expected an answer like pizza or wurst, but without hesitation she answered, “Spinat mit spiegeleiern und kartoffelbrei!” “Cooked spinach with fried eggs and pureed potatoes.”
I about fell over. “Wirklich?” I asked. “Really?”
“Wirklich,” she replied with a firm nod of her head. So when she came over, I presented the two girls with Maya’s favorite meal, and they both cleaned their plates, cooked spinach and all.
Most parents weren’t as pleased with the school menu as I was, and soon an email went around asking for concerned parents to come to an organizing meeting. I didn’t go because I had no complaints about the food, but I saw the many emails that went around, and the number of meetings planned. And after some time, enough parents had gotten together to force an improvement, and the school changed its caterer.
I noticed that protest on all levels happened more often in Berlin than I’d seen anywhere I’d lived in the United States, and notably, it often had a real effect, especially when it came to children. For example, our kids came out on top when they went up against some
developers, a normally powerful group in Berlin. The city’s east side has seen a lot of renovation and new construction in recent years, and our neighborhood was no exception. At one point, five new buildings were going up at the same time on the street that led to Sophia’s school, including one directly across from the school. The noise of hammering and sawing became so loud it became hard for the children to concentrate.
The principal wrote asking parents to call the city and the construction company. The fifth-grade students hung a huge hand-painted banner from their window that read in German: “Quiet please! We are working here!” The pressure worked. The construction company gave in and agreed to stop the noisiest part of their work until two p.m. every day, when the instruction part of the school day was over for most students.
American parents and children can take a lesson from our German peers. Protest can work. For a long time, many Americans have been reluctant to protest—taking to the streets is often viewed as something only radicals do, and even objecting to the practices of a teacher or school is sometimes seen as overly critical or even rude. American culture places a high value on being friendly and polite. Germans don’t have that baggage. For better or worse, they are known to be direct, even overly blunt in expressing their opinions.
The downside of Americans’ politeness is that it has allowed the people in power at all levels to become complacent. A German parent living in the U.S. told me she found that teachers and administrators were less open to addressing parents’ concerns than in her home country. To break this pattern, we have to get over our desire to be nice and start speaking up more often, not just to the people in the highest offices in our country but to the people in charge of our children’s schools and classrooms. We don’t have to be rude, but making change does require being direct and persistent.
If we gather enough parents together, we may be surprised by the results we can achieve. If we feel our children’s classes are too test-focused and the subject matter too narrow, if there’s too much homework or our kids need more time to play, even if we just want a better lunch menu, we can achieve change without waiting for political leaders to institute an entire school reform from the top down. Sometimes it just takes a few meetings, some phone calls, and letters—and involving the kids doesn’t hurt. Children can have a lot of sway. After all, I’ve seen them stop work on an entire high-rise.
