Officially, 12.1 percent are illiterate in Germany. However, only adults are counted. A study from the University of Hamburg reached this conclusion in 2018. This means that almost twice as many people with reading and writing difficulties live in Austria’s neighboring country as before. Among the working population, there are 6.2 million people who cannot read or write or can do so inadequately. About half have a migration background and therefore their mother tongue is other than German.
However, these figures do not include children and youth. As recent studies show, the situation is even more dramatic here. An analysis from the University of Bochum took a closer look at troubled schools in North Rhine-Westphalia, which has a particularly large number of children from poor immigrant families. Conclusion: More than half did not learn reading, writing, and arithmetic to any significant extent until the third grade. As many as 50 percent failed to meet minimum standards, and in four particularly stressed schools the figure was as high as 80 percent. Keep in mind: The 2018 results were evaluated even before the coronavirus pandemic and the Ukraine war, which ushered in a new wave of refugees.
Many studies show that the gap between problematic schools and schools with better educational environments is growing. Plus, the overall average is getting worse. The educational trends of 2021 set by the Institute for Quality Development in Education (IQB) had already created a sobering awakening. Their findings: More and more children are missing minimum standards in German and mathematics. One in five children – 20 per cent – fall behind by the end of primary school. Recent studies show an even more dramatic picture.
But politicians do not take action. The writer Harald Martenstein comments in frustration in “Welt”: “Today the decline of the German education system continues unabated.” He sees blame for continued “uncontrolled migration”, about which Interior Minister Nancy Feser (SPD) is doing nothing, with school “performance requirements” permanently “lowered” and excessive taxes in Germany. is being imposed, which lacks the resources to provide an adequate education for so many migrant children and is rapidly being lost.
Martenstein: “State schools are overcrowded and, even with the best will in the world, are often not able to provide the majority of children of immigrants with the minimum requirements needed for a modest career. But more are coming.”
There is a lot of cover-up going on between the public and politics. The number of illiterate adults fell from 7.5 to 6.2 million between 2011 and 2018. On the other hand, the columnist has a sense of evil. Non-literate migrant children would later become “parcel deliverers or recipients of citizens’ benefits” and a “new, uprooted and demoralized proletariat” is in danger of emerging. These people were rightly angry later because they were “driven into a dead end” by Germany due to the lack of adequate infrastructure.
“There is a connection between the educational devastation caused by overtaxing one’s own resources and immigration “exceeding every limit”. Month after month, young people from Syria and Afghanistan continue to travel to Brandenburg, often to Belarus. Come here illegally.
The columnist summarizes: “A country whose unique selling points include its highly qualified skilled workforce is destroying the foundation of its success. Germany now seems to me like a car heading towards a concrete wall and still going fast.”
