In tertiary education there are multiple tracks you can choose the more academically focused universities, more industry focused universities of applied sciences and higher certificates in the profession you learned (my father for example got a master painter certification, which allowed him to train apprentices and taught him a lot of the skills to run his own business).

But what's more important the school system starts splitting people up into workers and academics as soon as they start their secondary education: - The kids that perform better in school go to the "Gymnasium" which leads them to get a high school degree (Abitur or Matura) which allows entry to universities focused on academics. - The kids that perform worse go to a junior high school and start an apprenticeship and go to vocational school after finishing junior high. The academically stronger kids also have the option to get a high school degree at vocational school that allows them to enter a university of applied science (Fachabitur or Berufsmaturität).

Of course there are ways to change between the two tracks but most people follow one of the given paths. And I'd say even the more "ivory-tower" universities at least in STEM are really industry focused with companies having a big presence on campuses.

People in the comments call this system harsh, but what they fail to understand is that is not that you get a lane with 10 and that's your lane for ever. In Switzerland you can not go to Gymnasium but if you feel like it after the normal Sek (Secondary School, that is 3 years rather then 6) you can still do a short Gymnasium and get the same degree, its just that you lose 1 year.

You can also do the 3 years in Secondary, then do the Apprenticeship, for example in my case 4 years of school and working in IT (in my case software development) and during that you can complete almost the same degree you get in gymnasium. That degree will allow you to get into 'technical university' and you earn a batchlor. You can also do this degree while working.

Or if you really want to go to a full university like ETH Zürich, you can do 1 extra year of school after.

So the different lanes have a lot of intersections and ways you can go from one to the other. If you are slow at developing you don't go to the gymnasium but you can earn that same degree later in multiple ways if you discover.

This doesn’t seem supported by any data I can find.

“In 2009/10 there were 3,094 gymnasia in Germany, with c. 2,475,000 students (about 28 percent of all precollegiate students during that period)”

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gymnasium_(Germany)

A similar measure that’s a bit more comparable and easier to find data is rates of tertiary education. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_tertiary_...

If you look at the 4-year degree chart, Switzerland’s graduation rate is 49% while Germany’s is 28% for the year 2015. That would be unlikely if Germany’s per-capita attendance for Gymnasium was more than twice that of Switzerland’s.

Not sure where my number come from, honestly the last time I was interest in this was when I was in school.

The OECD, I don't know how it is calculated.

Today, almost everyone does Abitur and a Bachelor's degree... tbh you are regarded as pretty simple if you didnt finish at least a Bachelor and given our traditional dual system of diploma and trades it's really sad to observe this... We actually have a solid and proven system for people to learn the trades (Ausbildung) after secondary education. Master craftsmen like electricians have potential to earn WAY more than many of the snobby academics and will have insane job security. But "society" (read: industry) conditions people that a Bachelor is necessary. Got a Bachelor degree in whatever? Welcome to your new job as secretary, here is your €30k/year pre tax (with some plumber laughing in the background).

The meaning of the Bachelor degree has been watered down to nothing in the last 20 years. It sounds arrogant, but I really do know students in university who are incapable of composing a sensible German sentence that is logically conistent and grammatically correct. As if there was zero academic requirements to enter. Germany has a "numerus clausus" (required minimum grade)for many popular fields but Abitur grades are not comparable at all across federal states. 1.0 in Bavaria (actually hard) means something entirely different than in Hamburg (quite achievable) but students from both will be treated equal when chosen for university.

It's almost impossible to fail Abitur and the Bachelor's unless you make your own life unnecessarily hard or have some pretty bad luck in life. "Street smart" people will easily get a Bachelor degree because cheating is easy and expectations are minimal - unless you decide to do engineering at RWTH Aachen or TUM (which are amazing programs) in whcih case you'd actually be doing something mildly demanding.

When Germany switched from its diploma system to a more "internationally standardized" Bachelor/Master model it destroyed a successful model of education in an attempt to be more comparable on an international scale. Back in the day, people in the US or Asia wouldn't immediately know what degree "Dipl. Ing." corresponded to and how you'd translate that but I will defend my opinion to death that those degree programs were better at actually producing capable people.

Industry just wants to produce work drones and modern universities are their partners in crime. Actual academics start after the Bachelor when the simpletons and bored people have left.

Edit: not disagreeing that it's harsh, just wanted to clarify that point.

At least in Germany it depends on the state you are in. The teachers make their recommendation, not entirely based on your grades in school, but also based on your general approach to learning and understanding as they got to observe you for a few years. Depending on the German state, this recommendation is binding, but in some of the states the final decision is with your parents.

That said, switching from one type to another during secondary education is far from impossible, but also not always easy and smooth - it depends a lot on the school you leave and the school you enter. On the other hand, it’s very easy to start an academic education when you have finished your vocational training. More than one third of college students don’t have the „Abitur“ (graduated from Gymnasium)

I does sound great I must say. I've also found those Gammas are quite happy people on average. Some people call them 'cogs' but those are haters and deltas.

Or rather, academic test scores, which will be perfectly correlated with parents financial status, status and employment.

There's no doubt that a highly conscientious and thoughtful trades-person could raise children to compete with the bankers kids, but it's just so much harder.

So you end up with an institutionalized classism.

That said, the same thing ends up happening in the US/UK, probably by more systematic than institutionalized mechanism.

The dark truth is that in some ways if functions better, because broadly speaking highly conscientious parents raise highly conscientious kids, but it also makes things more stringent and unfair.

(Germany:) " Children from rural areas, pupils from lower socio-economic backgrounds and boys in general have a significantly lower probability of being selected to the most academic school track even when their ability is similar to that of their urban and better socially placed counterparts." [1]

The other thing is that Anglo culture is just more open.

PISA testing shows that when accounting for economic factors, immigrants to US/UK/Can etc. perform just as well as local kids. (i.e. immigrants are poorer, but they do just as well as those with same economic background)

On the Continent, immigrants fare considerably poorer, especially in Germany and ironically the worst in Finland which otherwise has one of the top education systems in the world. [2] (See page 28)

A lot of this might be a function of language: English is something many migrants might already speak whereas German and Finnish are that much harder to pick up.

That said from the rest of the PISA paper it doesn't seem that Continental Schools stick out that much otherwise and Germany did successfully make some 'big reforms' in 2000 that seemed to move the needle overall, though this could also be a function of unification leap forward.

As far as copyright in 19th century - I wonder if the UK's lack of progress in publishing was also a function of super classiest social hierarchy where they didn't see a point in that much education for the plebes?

As for 'modern lessons' I think this analysis applies mostly to 'knowledge' more so than much else. I don't think progress is hampered because 'Thor' is copyright and by and large, information is mostly accessible. I think this analogue might apply to the current issue of copyright of Scientific papers, but not much else.

[1] https://www.researchgate.net/publication/242221851_Inequalit...

[2] https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&c...

I also provided you with scientific evidence that the 'scoring' German approach systematically underrepresented those otherwise equally capable, which is further evidence of that.

Finally, the fact that migrant children perform so much more poorly in Germany compared to US/UK, while indirect, does provide more evidence for the pile.

'Test Scores' are not 'the best thing' for poor kids by a mile - they are merely an 'outlet valve' for some special kids from special families.

I remember being at the home with a woman who married a Latino migrant in California. She was a cleaner. I asked the teenage children 'what university they were going to' and they balked, they literally had not given it a thought. In their 'family / lifestyle / education / community' - University was for 'rich people'. The daughter was helping out part time with the mom at the cleaning company, I'm pretty certain she will grow up to be a cleaner and that's that.

What's 'best' for kids are good schools, good teachers, good mentorship, quality peers, and some semblance stability at home i.e. parents with stable jobs, not in jail, not evicted or homeless, not caught up in the drug world. Only with those things do 'tests' start to have some kind of meaning.

- VMBO-praktijk (applied vocational education, 4 years)

- VMBO-theoretisch (theoretic vocational education, 4 years)

- HAVO (general high-school education, 5 years)

- VWO (university-prep high-school education, 6 years)

Also, the specialization doesn't happen until they're 14, and students are free to switch if they meet the grades. If they get sufficient marks across the board, they can "upgrade" to the next track, or if they'd have to repeat the current year they can sometimes choose to downgrade a track instead.

Finally, students can re-enroll in the higher track after graduation as well (starting from the penultimate year). It's not uncommon for someone to complete their VMBO-T track first, then re-enter the HAVO track and get a HAVO certification in six years instead of the nominal five (or complete the VWO track in 7 years that way). As said, not everyone learns at the same pace and I think this setup gives many students lost of opportunities for a good outcome.

Zoals Joris Luyendijk heel correct uitlegt gaat bijv. slimheid veel meer over de kwaliteit van het Nederlands wat om je heen wordt gepraat als kind, dan of je werkelijk intellectueel sterk bent: https://www.nporadio1.nl/nieuws/binnenland/f4dce416-6b35-49f... - @ minuut 08:43

Ook in de docuserie 'Klassen' laten de regisseurs zien hoe het onderwijsstelsel juist het klasseverschil in Nederland verergert: https://www.2doc.nl/documentaires/series/1doc/2020/klassen.h...

"In Nederland zijn we ervan overtuigd dat iedereen gelijk is in het onderwijs en dat je dus niet rijk hoeft te zijn om naar het vwo te gaan. Is dit wel zo? Deze vraag stellen regisseurs Sarah Sylbing en Ester Gould in de zevendelige docuserie 'Klassen'."

Het NLse systeem is misschien in sommige opzichten beter, maar het deelt niet de gelijke kansen uit waarvan de meeste mensen geloven dat ze het doet.

The development in recent years has been that a larger part of the population is finishing their "Abitur", which is the high school diploma equivilant, allowing them to apply to universities.

Often they don't feel like universities are the right place for them though and they apply to apprenticeships, which makes it harder for people who ended school after tenth grade to get apprenticeships. At least in certain fields like lab assistents, IT workers and some others. In other fields such carpentry, plumbers, ... I don't think the Abitur impacts the application process much and can even be seen as a negative.

In my experience academic competition is way less cutthroat than what I hear from the US, India, China etc.

I have non-academic parents and the system sure as hell made me understand that very well at a young age. The folks with attorneys and doctors as parents had it way easier...

It took a lot of additional energy to be able to go to "Gymnasium" in Bavaria. In the state of Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, were I was born, this was much easier though.

This is one of the very few aspects that socialist/Eastern Bloc countries actually did better than the capitalist Western ones. Working-class kids had a fairly equal opportunity at getting into the same schools as the rich kids.

I also note that in addition to the Fraunhofer institutes which as you rightly say have a applied f9cus there are also the Max Planck Institutes with a much more fundamental focus. In fact I would argue that research in Germany is much more fundamentals focused than in many other countries.

[1] https://de.statista.com/statistik/daten/studie/247238/umfrag...

That said, they don't really relate to the topic of the article as they would not have had any influence on the German industrialisation, considering that they only exist since the 1960s.

The rise of industrialization in the states was driven by an educated work force from England that was low on supplies and materials, so they immigrated to the USA which had an abundance of supplies and materials.

When the English workers that were educated in various industrialization techniques setup in the USA, Americans got apprenticeship jobs under the educated English workers and learned.

Your observation about England being white-collar, classist and academic culture may be true to a general extent, but they were the first industrialized nation and then spread that industrialization knowledge through firms, trade, and related institutions. England did not rely on a classist ivory tower culture to operate their industrial sector nor to spread that knowledge.

“Mandarin” also being the name of a particular type of orange (fruit) because of the Chinese connection. The Dutch word for the fruit being “sinaasappel” — Modification of earlier “Chinas-appel” (close enough to English to guess) — https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/sinaasappel

However, the Orange Order in Northern Ireland is named after the Dutch King William of Orange, whose title “Prince of Orange” derives from a principality in southern France — https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prince_of_Orange — but this in turn is probably etymologically derived from the Gaulish ar-aus(i)o- ('temple, cheek': https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orange,_Vaucluse) while the fruit and colour come from the Arabic nāranj (نارنج) which is probably close to the original name for the fruit in Asia.

To a degree, most modern programming languages do just that - inspire themselves in ye olde K&R C of the 1970s heavily, but dropping the parts that made the code unsafe or impractical.

I can't agree more, as I saw what you say for a fact when working in Asia (mainly in Japan and to a lesser extent elsewhere—as I'd spent less time in those other areas). The work I was doing at the time meant that I mingled daily with ordinary workers and I could see firsthand the way the work culture worked.

I recall several instances that struck home to the extent that I've never forgotten them—and I've recounted them to others on many occasions since to illustrate this cultural difference, for they manifest in different (and very sensible) patterns of work (the approach to certain types of work are altogether different to those one typically sees in Western cultures). Once such instance involved a very well known Japanese car manufacturer (where for a time I found myself working in a Japanese car manufacturing plant along with the workers (it's too involved to explain how this came about, you'll just have to take my word that it's fact).

Needless to say, car manufacturing plants are complex beasts especially when they involve JIT (Just in Time), automated assembly, robots etc. as well as skilled manual labor—all simultaneously occurring together. Here, the instance that stands out is how the cleaner/floor-sweeper was employed. Unlike in the West where his job would have been clearly defined to only one type of task—here, that being to keep everything at floor level clean—his 'equivalent' position in Japan was in fact much more complex (also his work was much more varied and thus more interesting for him). Instead of just having to keep the floor clean he had full responsibility for everything that happened in his section of the factory from right at floor level to 30cm above it. This meant that his work and responsibilities involved the following:

(a) Keeping the floor clean and ensuring that things/miscellaneous objects were not left in the wrong place that would hinder production.

(b) He had full responsibility to ensure that any damage to the floor's work surface was fixed immediately/ASAP and that included ensuring any damage to the painted surface was immediately repainted.

(c) He was fully responsible to ensure that any damage to the robot tracks (copper strips embedded at the floor's surface that robots followed to move and deliver stuff) were fixed immediately (as the copper was exposed, the tracks could be easily damaged (an open-circuit could bring things to a halt, hence if damage occurred there then it was of considerable urgency to have them fixed). Moreover, any failure meant that the monkey was on his back to have things up and running ASAP—but what's truly significant was that he had full autonomy to act immediately without first having to seek approval from his supervisors—as he had both the authority and resources at his disposal to do so (if his supervisonrs hadn't already been made aware of the problem, which is most unlikely given the plant's excellent submarine-like Christmas tree fault system that alerts everyone across the plant, then they'd have been informed afterwards).

(d) He was responsible for ensuring that all ancillary plant and equipment between floor level and 30cm above it was working and fully maintained (that included facilities such as power outlets (which included both 110 and 220V outlets at every point), note: all power utility outlets were within this 30cm range. (Excluded from his responsibility was plant specifically related to the manufacturing process, industrial machines, presses etc. although he'd be part of the team involved in helping to fix them).

(e) He was responsible for ensuring any damage to the walls within this 30cm range was fixed (this also meant responsibly for keeping them clean and when necessary having them repainted.

Clearly, this worker had considerable responsibilities and that he'd been properly trained for the work, in fact he wasn't just a cleaner but rather a skilled worker who had to have at least trade-level skills in several trades and the guys who did this work took it very seriously indeed (they considered what they did to be absolutely essential to the production process).

I don't have time to discuss the production line fault system except to say that when a production fault occurred all workers responded in ways that would make a drill sergeant very happy (frankly, it was amazing to witness).

This and other instances were an eye-opener to me, the way things happened there I reckon just couldn't be implemented in the West, and similarly to you I'd put this down to both the egalitarian educational systems common throughout Asia as well as to workers having a different type of attitude to work—one that's instinctively much more collaborative (they've a very clear sense of the common goals).

______

BTW/Afterthought: I reckon you're right about Germany, it's always had a strong apprenticeship culture from ancient times and it's always paid attention to skill and craftsmanship and not just learning a trade for its own sake (that became evident to me years ago when I was working there). If any part of European cultural work practice can be reasonably equated to that existing in Asia then the German approach to training and apprenticeships has to be the closest (although I reckon it's still quite different to what's seen in Asia).

Longstanding journeyman exams, (Gesellenprüfung), and even the more modern duales Ausbildungssystem, vocational training system in Germany along with the traditional time traveling around between an apprentice's training and full-time employment to gain experience shows that traditional apprenticeship culture in Germany was not lost to the same extent as it seems to have been in Anglophone countries, Britain, US, etc.

What mainly seems to have happened in Anglophone countries was that a major shift in thinking (a cultural shift) occurred after WWI and we saw a diminution in the influence of traditional guilds/guild halls followed quickly by an abolition of the need for an apprentice to continue studying to become a master craftsman. Failure of a perceived need to continue the master craftsman tradition meant a concomitant loss of respect for that once-revered position, and so on.

Why this occurred almost immediately after WWI is hard to say except that I reckon it had much to do with the fact that there are more woodworkers buried in battlefields of Flanders than for any other profession (the next tally being other tradesmen). Thus, after the War the tradition died out for two reasons: (a) there were too few skilled artisans left to take up the guilds tradition as traditionally structured before the War, and (b) that in the wake of this huge loss of personnel from the workforce the way the trades operated was streamlined (and this also included the way apprentices were trained).

Why this 'withering' didn't happen in Germany to the same extent given that there are just about as many Germans buried in Flanders as those from other nations, Britain, France etc. is a moot point and it needs answering. The only things I can think of are that German cultural values were different and that they were in fact stronger (Germany didn't start to industrialize until much later than did Britain—industrialization wasn't fully underway in Germany until Bismarck), and perhaps this delay contributed to the fact that values hadn't had time to weaken to the extent that they did in Britain and elsewhere. Moreover, it's likely that intrinsic German values also played a strong role, that being that ingrained cultural practices were harder to shift than elsewhere.

If anyone has thoughts or a better/more accurate answer then I'd be glad to hear it.