There are clearly decision makers detached from reality involved here.
If you look at people that are not academically inclined and call them under performers then maybe that’s part of the issue. I think everyone has strengths and weaknesses, and if someone is more inclined to do vocational training rather than the standard track I think their strengths and interests should be developed / encouraged. An educator teaching someone that is actually interested in what they are being taught sounds like a more rewarding experience than lecturing a class where maybe 5 of 40 (not an actual stat) students are actually engaged.
It's not me doing that, it's education schools telling prospective teachers that their students will just be "learning their math by themselves", and the teachers can simply be facilitators. It must be a comfy job teaching math class to little Carl Friedrich Gauss and the like, but what about the remaining 99% of students - who will need actual teaching?
For those not familiar, he is the founder of BioNTech, the German researchers who developed Pfizer's SARS-COV2 mRNA vaccine.
Uğur moved from Turkey to Germany at age 4. At the end of primary school his teacher had assigned him to 'hauptschule'. It was only because of a neighbour's intervention that he was later put through 'Gymnasium' i.e. on track to study 'higher' studies.
The rest is history, after med school he did a doctorate in Imunotherapy, he founded a 18billion revenue biotech company and saved countless lives with what we now call the Pfizer mRNA covid vaccine.
Had that primary teacher's decision been held it really would have been a 'butterfly effect' of catastrophic proportions for Humanity.
For every unit of societal productivity created by a late bloomer that is saved by a common-stream system, I would personally argue that there is an order of magnitude more societal productivity lost by holding back the more typical high performers.
Late blooming intellectuals aren't the norm. Most highly intelligent people begin performing as such from a young age.
This one example just stuck with me when I read it because of how serindipitous his mRNA research turned out to be during an all out worldwide pandemic.
I didn't really find my academic ability, and programming until I was in my twenties.
Is there something you wish they had done differently?
We previously ran a split system, with exams splitting pupils at 11 into academic ('grammar') and non-academic ('secondary modern') schools. Many grammar schools were good; most sec mods were awful. The exams also famously had pretty poor predictive power for underlying academic ability as an adult, so pathways had to be developed to allow bright pupils to go to higher education despite being mis-sorted in the original exam - which somewhat undermines the point of the system. Comprehensivisation has never been nationally mandated, but nearly all areas have now done away with academic selection at 11. The remaining holdouts are mostly suburban Conservative areas where political power is in the hands of the well-heeled upper middle classes who are strongly in favour of grammars (and expect their own children to go there). Interestingly, Margaret Thatcher (as Education Secretary under Heath) was responsible for more grammar school closures than Labour was.
Vocational/academic choices are now being made at age 14 and 16 either within the secondary schools or by moving to local further education colleges (similar to US community colleges and trade schools). Vocational classes are low status. Britain no longer has a strong industrial sector to use such skills, and although both parties advocate for better vocational education essentially everyone who matters would be most unhappy if their darling children were diverted from a university track in the direction of trades. That's something they want other (poorer) people's children to do, not their own. We've never developed good vocational training for offices/services jobs, and although such courses do exist they're not taken particularly seriously by employers, despite several rounds of national reforms.
I don't think university is appropriate for everyone and I dearly wish skilled trades had a higher position in society, and generally don't believe in the idea of "unskilled labor". But the German system is ultimately as cruel as the American one.
One path could be partnerships with local community/technical colleges. My high school participated in a program called "Middle College" where high school students took classes at a local community college (can't remember if it was all or just some) and that seemed to work well.
There's also a strong racial/class component to who gets into Hauptschule/Realschule/Gymnasium, surprise surprise.
I mean... e.g. in Philosophy the teacher was absent for most of those two years resulting in us having to entertain ourselves for those "lessons". When we finally entered Gymnasium at 7th grade we received a culture shock when we had to learn the "Zauberlehrling" by Goethe in 1,5-2 weeks for recital in the first weeks.
Realschule felt more like Kindergarten from the treatment by teachers like their attitude while teaching and them not being interested in bullying unless it turned really physical, then protected the bullies when the bullied hit back. What I'm saying is, as the slightly fat kid who also didn't get all the shiny new things from his parents I was bullied by a group of other students surrounding and harassing me almost every single day during breaks those incompetent "teachers" only had the "advice" to basically let the bullies tire themselves out from bullying but heaven forbid once trying to break out of the encirclement i tried to hit one of those bullying lowlives, the teachers descended like vultures isolating me in a room for the rest of the break questioning why I did that instead of "just ignoring the bullies". Those bullies never received any kind of discipline/punishment.
Later in Gymnasium, I once had a very heated verbal altercation with a classmate within earshot of a teacher, we were taken aside, our parents called in for an evening sitdown that same week, there we resolved our differences with some guidance from a teacher and remain friends even now.
Both schools were only staffed by older teachers with the youngest being late-40s/early-50s and several teachers retiring during my stay at the Gymnasium, so probably little to no influence from education during newer eras of teaching.
Honestly I wish I could smack that idiot Brodkorb for all the stupid shit he did as education minister.
¹: no split after 4th grade, instead have everyone go through Realschule for 5th and 6th grade, only starting the split at grade 7.
> our parents called in
should be
our parents were called in
Obviously indirect social stratification is still at work in the process.