Braden Goyette
Today is meant to be the high-point of Germany's 2009 student strike - at universities and secondary schools all over the country, walk-outs and other actions have been planned to draw attention to the state of the German educational system and call for reforms.A sizeable crowd gathered on the campus of Jena's Friedrich Schiller Universitaet (FSU) despite the rain Monday to kick off the “week of action”, drawn by the live rock music booming out over the square and the exhuberant words of a faculty lecturer in favor of the students' protest. The rhetoric was high-flying - phrases like "cracking the whip" and "eliminate bureaucracy" were thrown around, with complaints about the number of tests students have to take and increasing pressure to perform. A glib comparison of the current educational system to the situation during GDR-times even made its way into one speech, something that can't but seem contradictory when the strike is positioning itself against the commercialization of knowledge and influence of neoliberal deregulation on the educational system.
For Americans, coming from a country where paying $40,000+ a year and getting into massive amounts of debt to go to school has become the norm, the demands of the German student movement can sometimes be hard to take seriously. Here, the norm is that students don’t pay tuition - though some schools are starting to introduce fees of 500 Euros a semester.
But according to Jan Latza, member of the strike's Berlin Technical University-based national press team, tuition fees aren't even the primary impetus for this year's week-long protest. The three-tiered school system, which sorts children into vocational and college-bound tracks early in life and, the protesters contend, systematically disadvantages children from immigrant and working-class families, has long been the cause of protest among younger students.
“There have been protests at the secondary schools for years already,” Latza explained. “Last year there were about 100,000 students out on the streets, and at a certain point there was this big discrepancy – the high-schoolers were in the streets and the university students, who’d already been seeing massive re-structuring in the system for years, were doing relatively little outside of the struggle against tuition fees.”
The introduction of Bachelors and Masters‘ programs as part of the Bologna Process - a series of accords between European countries made in the hopes of streamlining education in different member nations and giving students more mobility within the EU - provided another impetus for university and high school students to combine their efforts.
Previously, students could pursue a Diplom or Magister, programs that involved a longer study time. Now with the Bachelors and Masters programs, there’s another round where students can be sorted out of the system, Latza argued, with significantly fewer places in Masters programs and fewer opportunities for students to get the same depth of education that they could in the old system. “There’s a clear connection with the debate being raised by the high school students, that this social sorting-out process […] and the exclusion that essentially begins in kindergarten and continues into university has to stop.”
At the FSU pre-strike concert, both speakers on stage and students in the crowd further cited the six-semester period for completing a Bachelors as far too short for substantial learning to take place, and called for an eight-semester minimum for completing the degree. Roland, a FSU alum who recently completed a Diplom in biology and now holds a research job in the surrounding area, said that he doesn't support the Bachelors-Masters system in the sciences. In addition to the limitations of the short study period, degrees from different universities aren’t really seen as equivalent, he explained, taking as an example that equivalent degrees from Jena and Munich will not be weighed equally. This in effect limits students’ mobility, he continued, and until universities are better connected with one another, one of the main original goals of the Bologna process isn’t being achieved.
As a foreigner watching these events unfold, what struck me most was the high level of nation-wide organizing and coordination that went into this protest week: from the nationwide assemblies leading up to this protest, to the unified aesthetic of posters and fliers in cities all over the country, to the close cooperation with big labour and educators’ unions like Ver.di and the Gewerkschaft Erziehung und Wissenschaft.
It also struck me was just how foreign the idea of students striking was from an American perspective. Why does it then seem to be the case that the lower the tuition fees, the stronger the culture of protest? Is it because, growing up with such extensive social programs provided by the state as the norm, young people feel more entitled and empowered to ask for more?
Some students at the FSU were more skeptical about this week’s protest, and expressed doubts as to whether it would have any effect whatsoever. “I would say there’s a small percent… roughly 15 or 20 percent who believe that these actions will actually change something. But the majority doesn’t believe in it,” said Daniel, a 5th semester history and sociology bachelors student at the FSU.
It seems to be a difficult balance between involving everyone and presenting clear demands, and the students I spoke to at the Jena pre-strike party felt that the movement tries to take on too much at once, rather than laying out clear, focused goals.
It remains to be seen, throughout the course of the day, how great a portion of German students care about these issues, and whether government and university administrations will take notice of their demands. But for the movement’s flaws and high demands, I can’t help but think we could use some more of this kind of spirit back home – that in some respects, their educational strike could take us to school.
Photo Dan Antonaccio
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