Status: 08.12.2023, 22:35 p.m.
By: Georg Anastasiadis
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He also sees the bad Pisa study as a fault in Merkel's policy: Merkur editor-in-chief Georg Anastasiadis. © Monika Skolimowska/dpa/Montage
Railways, migration, schools: Germany is groaning under massive problems. Former Chancellor Merkel is also partly to blame for this, says editor-in-chief Georg Anastasiadis. One Comment
The train is not coming. And our students are dumbing down. Germany, which doubts itself, has had to cope with two further low blows this week with the Pisa shock and the collapse on the railways. But this time, not even Friedrich Merz can blame the chancellor and his traffic light. The fact that no train runs for days at a time in this country when winter does what it should, and that foreign children in particular can no longer count and read - this chaos was caused during Angela Merkel's 16-year reign.
Poor performance at Pisa: Angela Merkel's policy now reveals weaknesses
Their self-satisfied "We can do it" reverberates like a mocking echo when the authors of the Pisa study blame the dramatic new German education crisis on the "lack of language skills" and "failed integration" of children who have immigrated since 2015. Merkel's phrase remained hollow because her door-to-door policy was not followed by any effort not only to endure the onslaught, but also to master it.
Unfortunately, we didn't make it: not in the labor market, where half of the Syrian and Iraqi immigrants still couldn't get a foothold. Not in schools, where for too long there was no compulsory language support, but the (far too few) teachers were left alone with the problems when many of their students could not follow the lessons because they hardly spoke a word of German. And not even when it comes to conveying value. Since the Palestine demonstrations, we have known more precisely what unites many migrants in the growing Muslim communities in our big cities: it is hatred of Jews, and often also contempt for emancipated women and gays. The CDU politician Jens Spahn has now also felt this: When he came to talk about his husband during a visit to a school class, a teenage Afghan refugee demonstratively sat away from him.
Merkel messed up, the traffic light must govern – a comment
The state must no longer allow school classes in the big cities, with their migrant proportions of up to 80 percent, to become breeding grounds for anti-Western values and intolerance. Otherwise, the unculture of those countries from which the people fled, but which at the same time shaped them, will at some point also determine our lives in Germany. Then the Middle Ages will come back to us. The fact that Merkel screwed up must not be an excuse for the traffic light to do the same.