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»Pedagogical abyss«?
Fourth graders in Neumünster (Schleswig-Holstein)
Photo: Frank Molter/dpa
Reading difficulties in around a fifth of fourth graders, spelling failure in a third: the results of the IQB education trends presented last week are disastrous.
One thing is clear: the corona pandemic is only partially responsible for this.
The debate about who else is to blame for the poor performance of German elementary school children has become sharper - and sometimes downright shrill - almost a week after the results were presented.
Cornelia Schwartz, state chairwoman of the Rhineland-Palatinate Philologists' Association, said she was "horrified" by the results obtained by the Institute for Quality Development in Education.
She sees the responsibility for this in the content of questionable training for prospective teachers at the universities.
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"You can almost describe the elementary school didactics currently being propagated by the universities as didactics of neglect," Schwartz says angrily.
»Errors are only partially corrected and therefore get stuck in the minds of the children, the joint development phases led by the teacher castigate this didactic as teacher-centred, and automated practice with arithmetic – you don’t want to know anything about that anymore.«
Pedagogical abyss and pseudopedagogy?
This approach, says Schwartz, has been leading the German education system "to the pedagogical abyss for years."
She therefore calls for two hours of compulsory remedial teaching per week for classes 5 and 6 in secondary schools in order to be able to “at least partially catch up on what was missed in elementary school”.
Jürgen Böhm, chairman of the German Realschule Teachers' Association, also distributes massively in the direction of elementary schools.
A major reason for the poor student work is the lack of performance orientation in the elementary schools and the ever-leveling of the requirements in the basic subjects, Böhm complains: “If you increasingly think about elementary schools without grades, indulge in pseudo-pedagogical teaching structures and experiments, abolish special schools, you have to don't be surprised by the result.«
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An explanation that noticeably gets Udo Beckmann's pulse racing.
The blaming of grammar school and junior high school teachers' associations on primary school teachers is "completely wrong," says the chairman of the Association for Education and Training (VBE), which also represents numerous teachers at primary schools.
For his part, he attests to his colleagues from the secondary schools, "that we are still stuck in school thought patterns from the last century and have not realized that it is the common task of all schools to encourage children in their entire personality".
Beckmann sees the greatest responsibility for the poor test results in politics: "Anyone who has ignored the underfunding at primary schools for years - with at the same time increasing tasks and increasing heterogeneity in the learning groups - should not be surprised if the measurable level of performance drops," says the teacher representative.
Elementary schools have been deprived of the necessary resources for years.
The fact that the Standing Scientific Commission of the Conference of Ministers of Education has only been looking for ways to cushion the dramatic shortage of teachers for a few weeks is evidence of "short-sightedness in educational policy".
However, Beckmann misses the will to carry out comprehensive reforms – not only in politics, but also in some other teachers' unions.
That's why the VBE boss is extremely skeptical about the near future in elementary schools: "It's easy to predict right now that the next IQB study will be even more devastating if politicians aren't willing to give that to elementary schools , what you need."
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