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This is utter nonsense. Yes there are homework help businesses (and NGOs, council-run offers, etc) in Germany or Sweden but this is a fringe business and the vast majority of students never use it. If you have evidence for the contrary please provide it.

Its not like e.g. Korea where this is basically obligatory to use.

"Utter nonsens" is such a non-startar in conversations you know...

My "proof" is that everyone I know in Germany has been forced to change their kids school or use homework help or other way of paying for help in school because the parents either aren't educated enough to help by themselves or just don't have the time to help them due to working two jobs to keep up. This is ofcourse in a small area in Germany but it is one of the densest populated.

When walking in the streets I see homework business in the former shopping windows even in tiny towns. And they are visibly used by youth.

I also had a hard time believing this about Germany when I first started hearing about it 20 years ago but I have met so many parents that repeat the same thing and it hasn't changed a bit. No wonder Montessori and Waldorf schools are so popular there.

In Sweden the homework help is part of school. Our kids school has four different homework help after school that is run either by state/school or teacher students as a project. On top of that comes extra teachers for the kids with diagnoses. They always follow the student around to classes and help out where the teacher isn't enough.

> "Utter nonsens" is such a non-startar in conversations you know...

> My "proof" is that everyone I know in Germany [...]

See, the problem is that other people seem to have different anecdotal experience. So that's why in an online discussion it can make sense to appeal to published statistics and other articles.

> My "proof" is that everyone I know in Germany has been forced to change their kids school or use homework help or other way of paying for help in school because the parents either aren't educated enough to help by themselves

Welcome to the truth: the main determinant of a child’s education success is the socioeconomic background of their family.

> or just don't have the time to help them due to working two jobs to keep up.

This is a real problem in the English speaking world, where rents are higher than the average salary and where a kindergarten cost 2000£ per month. In Germany, where you can live pretty much everywhere on minimum wage, this is much much less prevalent.

> In Germany there is a big after school business with homework help that parents have to pay. There are old disilusioned teachers that has quit school and started homework help instead, making more money and actually helping the kids.

I find this rather hard to believe. A German teacher makes way more money teaching in a school than whatever they could make with a homework help business. An entry-level high school teacher earns between 40K and 60K, depending on the region.

Netherland actually has a very diverse educational system. With common standards, obviously, but there's a lot of freedom to found schools based on different educational, philosophical or religious ideas.

The reason for this "freedom of education" is that in the early 20th century, religious parties wanted to allow religious schools, whereas socialist and liberal parties wanted everybody to be allowed to vote. They compromised and enshrined both in the constitution.

The result of this is that anyone can start a school, as long as they meet a bunch of criteria and teach the correct curriculum. So public schools, protestant schools, Montessori schools, anthroposophic schools, and islamic schools all receive the same funding and have to teach the same curriculum, but they have freedom in how they teach it. If the quality of a school drops, they have to improve or get closed.

I think the system does a reasonable job of ensuring everybody can find a school where they can thrive. I'm sure there's room for improvement, but it seems to work well enough. In recent years, there seems to have been a lot of focus on making sure highly talented kids get sufficiently challenged; my oldest son went to a special 1 day a week school for talented kids, and half a day to a talent class in the school itself, and he skipped a grade, so all of that is possible. My youngest son struggles with language (originally speaking, now reading), and gets extra support for that.

There is an awful lot of testing, though. When I was a kid, there was just a single standardised test at the end of primary school (age 12). Now there's standardised testing in every year starting in the second year of kindergarten. I'm a bit baffled by the amount of testing, but I can only assume it helps them find kids that need some extra support or extra challenge.

It's more than just students. Testing also helps to control the effectiveness of each school's teaching method which is especially important in such a diverse system.

> In Germany there is a big after school business with homework help that parents have to pay.

I grew up in (Eastern) Germany, but left in 2009. As far as I can tell, cram schools like that are rather niche.

Compared to my adopted home of Singapore at least, where you see them on every corner.

Do keep in mind that the educational system in Germany is run by the individual states. And I have only seen Saxony-Anhalt directly on a day to day basis. Though I probably still had more exposure to the other states than someone from outside the country.

I didn't like German schooling that much. But I have no clue about the other complaints in your comment.

Living in Germany, I have the opposite observation: Good grades these days seem to be handed out (too) freely - the other day I again had a college-entry-level student who did not know essential stuff (in this case: no idea about basic history), even though he had an A- average (13/15 points) in his Abitur diploma.

This may be me getting old and starting to have strong, rose-tinted memories, but I am sure many who get good grades today would have been close to failing only twenty short years ago.

It might also depend largely on where you are in Germany. My contacts are mainly in NRW.