Babylune

Reading and Weeping

by kate baggott on October 23rd, 2007

I am a Canadian living in Germany. I am a stranger in a strange land. I like to think of myself as an open-minded person, but there are some things I just can’t get my head around to accept. Most things I reconcile as “different, but equal.” Some things remain “different, but worse.” For me, one of those things is the German educational system.

Where I live, children start first grade when they are six. For children, like my son, who were born between August and December, they can actually start closer to their seventh birthday. Sure, kids go to kindergarten, the equivalent of preschool or nursery when they are three, but they don’t do very much, if any, early literacy or numeracy while they are there. Childhood play and socialization are considered sacred.

I suppose that attitude would be OK with me if Germany’s system didn’t have such a low rank in international studies, if there were German as a Second Language classes for immigrant children in our local school, or if school wasn’t only half a day long. Here, children attend the equivalent of elementary school for four years, then they are divided according to “ability” and talent into three groups. The first group, one assumes, is preparing for university and goes to the Gymnasium. The second group, one assumes, is preparing for life in the civil service or clerical jobs and goes to the Hauptschule. The third group, one assumes, is preparing to enter the work force as soon as they leave school and take up a trade. Teachers make recommendations as to which stream a child should enter. The children are about 10 years-old when these decisions are made about their future. Most children end up in the same “educational stream” that will result in them getting a job much like the ones their parents have (it’s called “replicating social stratification” and basically means that families can’t climb the class ladder). Immigrant children often end up in the lowest stream, one assumes, because their German language skills never get up to the higher levels.

Canadian schools are much better now than they were when I went to them. I was motivated to learn, but I had to take care of a lot of my own education with Saturday trips to the library. I was never very interested in math and didn’t bother to teach it to myself and, when I got to high school and had wonderful teachers, it was too late. As a result, even today, anything beyond the concept of an exponent, it too abstract for me to grasp. Now, children start Junior Kindergarten in their fourth year of life, they start learning French or English earlier, they start learning to read earlier. In Ontario, children use to choose an “ability stream” when they entered high school at 14. There was basic (life skills), general (community college preparation), advanced (university prep) and sometimes enriched (university prep with extra). What they found, though, was that the process replicated social stratification. So, they changed it. Now all students take one stream together for the first year and are introduced to what opportunities there are and encouraged to think about what they want to do in the future. In Canada, the children of immigrants are more likely to enter university than children whose parents were both born in Canada. Your cab driver in Toronto might have been a medical doctor in Afghanistan, so you can bet he’s making sure his children study hard.

To say that I am scared silly about having my trilingual children in the German school system is an understatement. Now that we are campaigning to get my son into school a year early to help him develop his language skills, the worries are keeping me awake at night. I always assumed we would be back in Canada by the time my children started school, but my husband does not want to return.

So, I’ve taken matters into my own hands. I know that studies show early childhood education has life long benefits. It would be irresponsible of me not to use the knowledge I have to protect my own children. As a result I bought this book after reading about it on Cottontimer’s blog.

I should tell you that I have always read to both of my children since they were a few hours old. And, just because I want my children to read alone, does not mean I will stop reading to them. I think books are a shared experience and I want to share adventures with them for as long as they will let me.

I generally like the phonics method this book uses, but the scripts the authors have written use some poor grammar. “Say it fast” should actually read “say it quickly, ” but I get the point of breaking down words into sounds and then reconstructing them. Not that my 5 year-old son doesn’t resent my trying to teach him. He doesn’t mind that I teach other kids, but he thinks, perhaps correctly, that he should have a teacher who is not his mother.

In the hopes that my daughter won’t have the same issue, I have started reading this book:

I haven’t started yet, but I’ve been checking their research and I do agree that the culture of reading should start early and that word recognition can be part of learning how phonics works later. I hope if I do some of this program, my daughter won’t have any of the “you’re my mother, not my teacher” attitude that my son has now.

Still, I know this is what I need to do to protect my children from the threat of an educational system that wants to restrict them, but I am not sure it’s a good idea. My husband was almost seven when he started school, but because he was ready to learn, his grandfather and parents taught him to read at home. He was bored at school and very badly behaved. Not normal boy bad, but horrendous brat bad. That said, both my husband and I were raised with one language, not three, so maybe learning to read in English and Bulgarian at home won’t interfere with learning German at school.

I know I have written a lot and have been very, very boring, but I had to get all my anxieties about these issues out. I am doing what I can, but I am still deeply freaked out. Does anyone else stay up at night worrying about their children’s education?

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POSTED IN: Baby Care, Mental Health