Braden Goyette and Ali Brunn
The dust has settled
from the educational strike’s week of action, and different media organs are already pronouncing their verdicts. But let’s rewind a little bit. We were in Bamberg the day of the main strike, and though the week played out differently all over the Bundesrepublik, some themes and tensions came out in small exchanges throughout the day that are worth re-visiting - particularly the generational antagonisms that emerged, the role that leftist parties played in the strike, and a lot of talk through the megaphone about student fees and relatively little about the structural problems within the system.Show me the money – generational takes on the students’ demands
Bamberg's medieval market square was filled wall-to-wall with students Wednesday morning, pressed in around the stage in the cobble-stoned space between rows of fruit stands. Signs above the crowd bearing the slogans "Rich parents for all"; "It's too bad my school isn't a bank,” and the recurring chants of “Education for all, and it should be free,” put the issues of tuition and funding center stage as the most prominent rallying points, over the strikers’ many other demands (which include, among other things, greater student representation in the educational system's decision-making bodies, the elimination of the three-tiered secondary school system and the Bachlors/Masters system in its current form).
Many older people present in the square and surrounding streets expressed skepticism about the impetus for the protest. “You all just don’t want to work!” yelled a man in his fifties or sixties to a college student sitting behind a table stacked with literature from leftist parties supporting the strike.
Two other observers, Wolfgang and Therese, who identified themselves as a retiree and homemaker, resented what they saw as the students’ sense of entitlement. Everything the two of them had gotten throughout their lives, Therese said, was earned through hard work and “radical saving.”
“The students are above, you know, and us ordinary folks, we get pushed under.” In her experience, she said, “you’re always hearing about the poor students. The cafes are always full of ‘poor’ students. But when could I ever afford to sit in a cafe and drink coffee? Everything I had, I put towards my children.” She believes that many people feel the same way, she added, particularly in the more rural areas.
A couple who looked about the age to have been part of the 1968 student protest generation had a different take on the situation. “I think it’s great,” Fritz said of the protest, watching the crowd from his bicycle with his five-year-old son on his lap.
“[The three-tiered school system] is obsolete.” Employers, he said, increasingly look for students who have completed an Abitur, the exit exam from the top-tier, university-track high school, the Gymnasium. Students from the Haupt- and Realschule, who earn degrees that should set them on vocational and professional tracks, have a hard time finding employment under these conditions. “It’s nothing new,” he said, though the economic crisis has aggravated the problem.
Where systemic problems figure in
When asked, individual students expressed concern about structural issues, though these didn't figure as prominently in the way the students presented themselves. Few seemed to doubt, for instance, that the three-tiered system is a problem. “Of course it is,” remarked Denise and Andrea, high-schoolers in the 10th and 8th grades, respectively. “Students at the Hauptschule should learn more, they should have better opportunities. But this [strike] won’t accomplish anything,” they concluded, referring to similar actions that hadn’t had an effect the past. The two had nonetheless skipped out of class to catch a glimpse of how the protest was going.
A group called Schule ohne Rassismus was present with a banner at the march to draw attention to the discriminatory character of a system that disproportionately sorts out children from migrant backgrounds, explained Eva Musslein, a member of the group from Bamberg’s Franz-Ludwig-Gymnasium. The group has chapters at 580 schools throughout the country.
For Anna Kathrine, a high-schooler involved in the strike organization, the major issue at stake was equality of opportunity. Students are placed in the different high schools as of the age of 11 or 12, after which point changing tracks is very difficult. “The tests are extremely hard– it almost can’t be done,” she said.
Four girls outside the University of Bamberg gave us their take on the issues with the Bachelors/Masters system, citing increased time pressure caused by the short duration of study in ways that echoed students’ concerns at the FSU in Jena – though they did say that a Bachelor’s from Bamberg would be recognized as equal to one from Munich or other universities. Nonetheless, “we still don’t know how the job market will react to [the Bachelors’], how it will be recognized in comparison to the Diplom, for example,” explained Sophia, who studies English and political science.
Financing their studies came up as an important issue for all of them. “The main issues for me are student fees and the introduction of the Bachelor/Masters system,” said Katharine, a 2nd semester German literature and political science student. Sophia had recently started a side job at a bar where she works Friday nights and weekends, something that’s cut into her quality of life. “But it doesn’t work otherwise – you need to earn money somehow to fund your studies.”
What are the leftists bringing to the party?
An editorial in the University of Bamberg’s student paper framed the strike in grand terms as a generational struggle. We are the generation who’ll have to live with the consequences of this financial crisis, with the consequences of global warming – so the editorial goes – “and no one is really worrying about this generation’s education. Instead, every generation of politicians tries to perpetuate themselves with new reforms, and those sadly remain piecemeal.”
But to what extent is the motivation of the leftist parties supporting the strikers similarly self-serving – particularly in Bavaria, where leftist parties have long had difficulty gaining a foothold?
A marcher waving a flag for Germany’s Left Party, which has its roots in the remains of East Germany’s socialist ruling party, would not say whether the party was providing the strikers with financial support or give her name, though she emphasized that the party was behind the students ideologically.
Anna Katharine, meanwhile, confirmed that the Left Party, the Green Youth, and the socialistic students’ federation were among the groups who’d provided funding for the strikers’ t-shirts, banners, and other materials. Flags from the German Communist Party (KPD) as well as the more mainstream Social Democratic Party (SPD) could be seen waving above the crowd.
There was a good deal of literature produced by the various parties, particularly The Left, specifically for the strike and aimed at young people. An Andy Warhol-esque rendering of Karl Marx graced one pamphlet, while a newsletter put out by Solid, the Left’s youth organization, included articles with titles clearly appealing to the frustrations of high-school aged kids, like “Why school is shit and what we can do about it.”
It’s difficult to determine who might be using whom in this relationship – whether the students were being indoctrinated as a future voting base, or whether the students were being pragmatic and taking all comers when it comes to getting funding.
We’re here, we’re loud, we’re…ambivalent
Watching these strikes as an American can give you a hefty feeling of cognitive dissonance. The three-tiered school system is a totally new concept and is easy to perceive as scandalous, while the university students’ grievances are all about things that would be seen as totally everyday back home – working a side job to pay for school, for instance.
And though the nation-wide action was novel in a sense, we got the feeling that protesting is more like a mechanism of routine maintenance of systems here in Germany. The regulations read out before the strike – which established, among other things, what counts as a weapon, that the wearing of political uniforms is forbidden, and that traffic can be blocked for three minutes maximum -– made it seem like it’s a familiar, almost institutionalized form of furthering public discussion.
The push-and-pull between students’ near-utopian demands and the Economic Miracle generation’s resentment of those demands shed light on one of the challenges facing the 60-year-old federal German social state: the tension between providing for the populace and enabling the populace to get too comfortable with being taken care of.
Towards the end of the rally, a girl at the podium talked about how she should be able to decide what she learns and when she learns it, and that everyone should be able to go at their own pace. A middle-aged woman with a blonde beehive hairdo looked on skeptically from the cash register of her flower stand, muttering “Sure, sure. We’ll never get there.” She turned to the kids crowding her stand and shooed them away, telling them some of us are working here.
Photo Dan Antonaccio
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