Germany actually has a very high % of people going to Gymnasium. In Switzerland, a far lower % of people are going to the Gymnasium. I think in German its almost 80% of people, in Switzerland its below 30%. At least these are the numbers I remember form a decade or so ago.

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.

> I think in German it’s almost 80% of people, in Switzerland its below 30%

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.

Maybe it is lower then I thought. I can't seem to find Swiss data, 28% could be in line with Switzerland.

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.

In the 19th Century, not so many people ever got the Abitur, and most of them came from the middle and upper classes.

The system you described about early splitting is criticised widely - from UN, EU and most german parties - and has nothing to do with the success of the german dual education system as one could think by reading that description. Though to be fair, many reforms have been taken and it’s not anymore that harsh like the german educational system used to be in the past century.

I went through it and did the "optimal" track up to and including a Master degree.

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.

I'm currently finishing off my Bachelor at one of those universities with amazing programmes. However, I really don't see how you can claim that Germany has destroyed its system when really all they have done is kept it and instead give you a Bsc after the 3rd year and a Msc after the 5th year. Courses are still 100% exam based, with those exams often having 50%+ failure rates. In fact, at least for my subject, the bachelor is universally considered harder because of the challenging 'Grundstudium'.

In Europe the Masters degree is now just a continuation of the Bachelor. Most people do 5 years straight at university to get both, as that's what everyone else does. I got a BSc and learnt Mandarin instead of getting an MSc.

That system sounds super harsh, though. I think it splits the tracks when you're 10. I know plenty of folks who didn't know what they wanted to do even when they were 20, how are you supposed to do that when you're 10?

You don't choose. It's decided for you based on your ability.

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

That is not entirely true.

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.

This is not correct. It depends on the Bundesland (state) you live in. Some have mandatory assignments to a type of secondary schools, in others it’s up to the 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)

That's even worse. I can't imagine what you're able to do at 10 has that high of an impact on your abilities the rest of your life.

It might be a cultural-ideological reason that you think this way. Not every place in the world has those same assumptions and taboos. There are more blank slateist cultures where the only polite thing is to assume that any child can become anything. In other places people take it for granted that there are differences in abilities, talents, aptitudes, personalities that are fairly clear by age 10. In the US, this topic is too similar to how racists talk about blacks, so the whole thing is taboo. In places where the topic of innate talent does not have racial connotations (more homogeneous countries), people more readily accept it.

If you think modern Germany is homogeneous, well... :-)

If you think parent ever said then then we'll... :-)

It gets worse than that. Some of your life outcomes are determined by your genes and by your pre-ten-year-old lifestyle

Yeah, but we're talking about school systems here.

And with increasing understanding of epigenetics, even the lifestyle choices, and crises, of one’s grandparents could potentially influence life outcomes.

I wasn't surprised at all as a ten year old who got a recommendation for gymnasium and who didn't. It is a recommendation by the way, parents can chose to enter their kids in whatever they wish to. This leads to kids with high income / social economic status entering gymnasium and struggling mightily and kids from worker families who might make it not going to gymnasium.

It's not the rest of their life, just until they do it better. This is just the simple path. There are a dozen different paths in Germany's education-system.

> You don't choose. It's decided for you

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.

'based on ability'.

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...

Correlation is not causation. Testing objective ability (as opposed to essays and extracurricular engagement and volunteering) is the best thing for talented but poor kids. The alternative is cultural class markers that Anglo-style "holistic" testing selects for. That's much harder for a working class kid to acquire, compared to learning math and physics well. Saying this as someone with peasant and working class ancestors who could never set me (or my parents) up with all the fancy credentials and cultural experiences that my richer classmates had (foreign vacations, sailing, skiing, horse riding competitions, networking in high society etc). But I could study in school and could pass the objective tests.

The causation between wealth/status etc. and test scores is fairly well established.

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.

The model in NL is that the tracks aren't fixed, and most schools offer all tracks (or a subset) in the same building, so switching tracks doesn't necessarily mean losing friends. We also have 4 secondary education tracks, not two; in ascending order:

- 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.

> 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.

Being german, I think it's pretty harsh too.. I developed a little slower in school and just got lucky that the school I was in basically took everyone that passed the grade into the path towards higher education. From my understanding yes your grades matter a lot but it's also up to your parents which school they want to send you to.

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.

It is, also quite unjust when social background is concerned. Germany has it black on White from the PISA studies.

In reality it's mostly decided by parents, provided they are willing to spend resources to make sure their kids pass the tests.

I doubt that German parents put in a lot of resources for 7-10 year olds to pass tests. I guess private language classes can be a thing. But if it's anything similar to Hungary, kids with bad performance can also get extra afternoon help from the actual school teachers for free and kids of working parents can stay in school until later in the afternoon, working on homework under supervision etc.

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

Yes and what does that mean? That the system puts a disadvantge on people with difficult backgrounds.

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.

> 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.

Unfortunately a merit based system is the opposite of what we are moving towards in the United States, where the only metric that matters is the distribution of people based on their skin tone.