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Federal President Roman Herzog Calls for a Reform of the German Education System (November 5, 1997)

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Are our vocational and educational programs sufficiently up-to-date and suitable for practical application today? Above all, I have doubts about our dual education system. It is bad enough that we obviously have too few apprenticeships and that eager young people have to console themselves with last-minute initiatives. The actual problem, however, is that changes in the professional world occur a hundred times faster than our response to those changes and our formulation of appropriate new job descriptions. There is no defined educational path for many of the jobs in the booming service sector here in this country. Many young people have to content themselves with “on the job training” – and this, of all things, in an up and coming sector.

If we want to prevent our justifiably praised dual education system from becoming obsolete, and if we want to continue guaranteeing employers and young people a certain standard of training, then we need to continually modernize our training requirements. If the classically skilled tradesman is gradually being threatened with extinction, as some are saying, and if multi-functional workers with teamwork skills will be needed in the future, then our vocational training system also needs to react: with new vocational training associations, interdisciplinary rotation programs, the strengthening of key qualifications, and so on. I know that relevant proposals have been on the table for a long time, and that more than fifty occupational tracks have received a fundamental overhaul in recent years. The vocational academies are also setting a good example and some companies have established exemplary in-house vocational schools. But despite all the recent progress, the wheels of our vocational training bureaucracy are still turning too slowly.

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Third, I would like an education system that is international.

As important as it is to introduce new, internationally recognized college degrees, this isn’t enough. All of our educational institutions need to open themselves up to the world more than ever before and to become more cosmopolitan. We must learn the important world languages very early on. Why don’t we start with English classes in elementary school? Languages are learned most effectively at a very young age. Why don’t we consistently expand bilingual instruction at our schools? And is it really far-fetched to send entire classes abroad for half a year and to have foreign students sitting at German school-desks for six months?

There is no place for provincial thinking, least of all in our universities. I know that a number of institutions of higher education have – for example – already made lectures in English part of everyday life and have established close networks with universities abroad. But there are still large islands of provincialism.

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