Achtung Baby

by Sara Zaske

  Annette’s approach is also indicative of the national change in education in Germany in another way: She is an educational director at a comprehensive school, called a gesamtschule, one that includes teenagers of all abilities, sort of like an American high school, but without any tracking. This is a new thing in Germany, one of the changes that came about in response to the “PISA shock” of 2000, when Germany’s fifteen-year-olds tested below international averages in math, science, and reading on the Programme for International Student Assessment, commonly known as the PISA test.

  After the poor performance, German policy makers and educators took a look at how top-performing countries like Finland ran their schools and instituted major reforms, including mandating at least two years of kindergarten for all children, longer days for primary school students (which are still short by comparison with American standards), more centralized testing and assessment; and they introduced alternatives to the heavy-handed tracking system, such as comprehensive schools like the one where Annette works.

  The PISA results revealed that students from countries where children of all abilities were taught together through more grade levels did best. As Amanda Ripley details in her book The Smartest Kids in the World, children feed off each other when they learn and where the value of hard work is emphasized over innate talent. While many Americans may not realize it, U.S. schools track children even earlier than Germany does through our “gifted and talented” programs, and it starts at the earliest grade levels in elementary schools. This tracking goes on through high school. Some students can take advantage of magnet schools or ones with special honors or AP classes. Other children, too often from low-income and minority communities, are left with lower quality schools with less experienced staff that don’t offer the advanced classes. Even if all the students are in the same building, they are divided into remedial, standard, and advanced tracks. Ripley argues that the American approach is especially problematic since it emphasizes that doing well at school is a gift or a talent rather than something that can be attained through hard work.

  While America has tried to implement its own school reform with programs like No Child Left Behind and Common Core, these efforts have resulted in a lot of high-stakes testing for teachers and schools—but not for the students themselves, which is an interesting transfer of responsibility for learning. We’ve done little to flatten our tracking system or improve access to quality preschools.

  While America’s PISA scores have remained stubbornly mediocre, Germany’s reforms have yielded results within a little more than a decade, proving it can be done. By 2012, German fifteen-year-olds had moved up in the PISA rankings, rising to about seventh in math and twelfth in reading and science among the thirty-four countries that participate in the OECD. German students outperformed the test average and left the Americans well behind. (On the 2012 test, U.S. students ranked around seventeen in reading, twenty in science, and an abysmal twenty-seven in mathematics.) Most of the improvement in Germany’s test scores was attributed to a better performance among low-achieving and disadvantaged students. In other words, Germany had made its education system more equitable.

  Still, the social scientist Hurrelmann felt the chances for mobility are not very high in Germany, meaning children from lower income families have a tough time rising out of their socioeconomic class. He felt that the system of separating children so early often locked their status into place. Yet international comparative research shows mobility in Germany is still better than it is in the United States, even though, as Hurrelmann put it, we are “the entrepreneurial country where a dishwasher can become a millionaire. That’s a typical idea in your culture, but that isn’t the regular case.”

  Kai, another graduate student who studied with Zac, illustrates how the German system can work well for a student with fewer advantages. Kai grew up in a small town of fewer than 500 people. He had the advantage of a quality preschool/kindergarten. He was the first in his family to go to gymnasium, a university-tracked high school, and he did well, even though no one at home could really help him with his homework.

  His gymnasium served a rural population, but it was still a good school—good enough to give him the education he needed to pass three difficult arbitur tests in math, chemistry, and history. While his parents were supportive of his studies, they couldn’t afford to pay his living expenses when he went to university, so he received a stipend from the state. (He paid no tuition because German universities are free for qualified students.) He is now on his way to a PhD. A similar student in the United States would have faced many more obstacles to this achievement, starting with limited access to an affordable preschool, continuing with low-quality primary and secondary schools, and ending with the huge cost of attending college.

  Achieving Adulthood

  Turning eighteen isn’t the bright dividing line in Germany, at least for young people who go to university or other education after high school. They’ve already enjoyed many freedoms that American teens are denied, including the ability to manage their own time and movement. But most German university students are still financially tied to their parents. University tuition is free in Germany, but parents who have some means are expected, and required by law, to pay the living expenses for their children who are still in school up to age twenty-seven. If they cannot afford it, as in Kai’s case, the government provides a student stipend.

  This parental obligation galls some American expats I know, because they can’t refuse to pay, even if their children perform poorly at university or decide to major in something like basket weaving (not that German universities have such a major, but you see my point). Regardless, I imagine that many middle-class parents in the United States would be relieved to pay only the living expenses for their college-age children and not tens of thousands of dollars in tuition as well. The German approach leaves young adults financially dependent on their parents, but those parents cannot control their grown children with threats to withhold funding. They are free to make their own life and educational decisions.

  Which brings back that question of what makes an adult in our modern world? After so much independence as children and teens, are the young adults in Germany more responsible than their American counterparts? Young Germans do participate in society more than Americans by volunteering and voting in much greater numbers. About 35 percent of Germans ages fourteen to twenty-four are involved with nonprofits, according to a German ministry survey. Less than 22 percent of America’s sixteen- to twenty-four-year-olds volunteered in 2015, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. As for voting, young eligible German voters, age eighteen to thirty, had participation rates of 60.3 percent to 64.2 percent in the 2013 German parliamentary election, according to the BPB. In contrast, only about 50 percent of eligible American youth ages 18 to 29 voted in the 2016 presidential election, according to the Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning and Engagement.

  Perhaps even more important is how young people feel about themselves and their future. The Shell Youth Study of 2015 indicated that the vast majority of German young people, from ages twelve to twenty-five, were feeling good about their future, with only 3 percent having a bleak outlook. The study described young Germans as being a “pragmatic generation” who at the same time were eager to make the world a better place: “… this is a young generation who is more adventuresome: their attitude extends beyond a sober orientation towards success. Rather, they pursue idealistic visions. They want to get on with the job, be movers and shakers and explore new horizons. And they are willing to run risks in doing so.” This description sounds like a confident group of young people well prepared to take on the challenges of the future.

  American young people are also optimistic, but then optimism is a core part of our cultural character, whether it is realistic or not. A 2013 Gallup survey of American teens found that almost all of them felt they were very likely or somewhat likely to have a better standard of living than thei
r parents. (Yet the adults were decidedly less optimistic on the topic. They were almost evenly divided on whether the younger generation would do better or worse.)

  However, many young Americans have trouble maintaining this sunny outlook when they hit college campuses. In a 2013 survey by the American College Health Association of more than 100,000 college students, over half reported that they felt “very sad,” “very lonely,” or “overwhelming anxiety” within the past twelve months. In 2015, the Chronicle of Higher Education ran a series of articles addressing a reported mental health crisis among college students. Campus counseling centers have been inundated by students in need: 89 percent of the centers reported a rise in anxiety disorders and 58 percent saw an increase in clinical depression.

  Anecdotally, college educators are reporting that students lack “resilience.” They are easily devastated by small setbacks and need more hand-holding to make it through a course. It’s not hard to see how this range of problems from lack of resilience on up to serious mental health problems might be the result of our overprotective parenting culture. Many parents supervise and control their children’s behavior while at the same time pushing hard for achievement—as defined by the parents, not by the children for themselves. Then, once these grown children are released into the adult world, they don’t have the skills or the internal strength to handle the challenges of being on their own.

  Former Stanford dean Julie Lythcott-Haims blames the many intelligent but fragile college students she saw on campus on overparenting in her book How to Raise an Adult. She feels that parents who escorted their kids from “milestone to milestone” did more harm than good. “It can leave young adults without the strengths of skill, will, and character that are needed to know themselves and to craft a life.”

  In contrast, mental health among the generation of the “pragmatic” German youth appears to be stronger. The percentage of German young people with diagnoses of depression is half that in the United States (7 percent of Germans compared to 14 percent of Americans ages eighteen to twenty-nine according to Gallup’s 2011 Health and Well Being Index). Anxiety also appears lower among all German adults. Studies place the lifetime prevalence of anxiety disorders in the United States as among the highest in the world at between 23 percent and 28.7 percent; in Germany, it’s 13.4 percent, according to a review of anxiety studies published in the journal Brain and Behavior. In addition, fewer Germans of all ages commit suicide (9.2 per 100,000 Germans versus 12.1 per 100,000 Americans according to the WHO). There are many factors that may influence these numbers, but it does point to a healthier mental state and a stronger resilience among adults in Germany than in the United States.

  Taken together with the fact that German youth are more likely to be employed or in school; more likely to avoid problems like unwanted pregnancies, binge drinking, drug abuse, and violence—and that they are more likely to participate in society than their American peers—a strong case can be made that the German approach to raising children results in more positive outcomes.

  It’s also simply logical that young people will be more self-reliant and responsible if they’ve been raised to be that way from a young age: if as children, they walked to school by themselves, played freely, dealt with risk, managed their own relationships, discussed difficult subjects, and pursued their own ideas and career goals. Children who are encouraged to test out independence and freedom all along grow up to become young adults who are better equipped to handle their own lives.

  We American parents have the best intentions: We want to protect our children from danger, to shape them to be good people, to give them the tools to succeed in life. We’re just going about it the wrong way. Many of these things require less interference from parents, not more. Ultimately, the children have to do it for themselves. Otherwise, we risk having whole generations of young adults who are overly dependent—who do not have, as Hurrelmann puts it, the ability to become their own “self-managers,” the ability to run their own lives.

  I was beginning to embrace this German approach, to feel strongly that selbständigkeit (“self-reliance”) and independence were vital for our kids, when Zac got a call from California. He was offered a position located at a research lab in the Bay Area, not far from where his family lived, and not far from where Zac and I had first met in a bookstore all those many years ago.

  We were going home.

  13

  Coming Back to America

  The California dream is the American dream of opportunity writ large. California is gold in the hills; it’s the farming paradise in East of Eden; it’s the promise of fame in giant bold-faced type placed on a hill with lights on it. It’s an app that will make you a Silicon Valley billionaire.

  I had swallowed the California dream whole when I was twenty-three. Now as I returned older, wiser, and with my family in tow, I was not so sun-struck. When our airplane banked over San Francisco, I still felt some of that old excitement, but after so long away, I knew the opportunities in California were not as golden as they seemed, that most of the beauty in the Bay Area was on the surface. In reality, Berlin, even with its long, dark winter nights and grimy streets, was a much friendlier place for families than that shining city by the bay.

  In comparison to Germany, the United States can be a hard place to live. Just making ends meet is difficult for many Americans, and it’s particularly difficult in the Bay Area with its soaring rents and high cost of living. The safety net in America is very thin, and nowhere is that more obvious than in San Francisco, where the ugly side of the American dream is out in the open, homeless, and sleeping on the streets.

  The kids didn’t know about any of that yet. All they saw was sunshine and blue water and more opportunities for fun. We stayed first with my mother-in-law, who showered the kids with attention and treats. Aunts, uncles, and cousins came to visit, and everywhere there were flags, which the kids kept pointing out. “American flag! American flag!” It was a game they used to play in Berlin, yelling out whenever they spotted a different country’s flag, but in the United States there was only one kind of flag, and with the Fourth of July approaching, the game got really old really fast.

  Yet this is something we’d wanted for our kids. We wanted them to feel American. We wanted them to spend time with their grandparents and get to know their extended family. In Berlin, we had talked a lot about whether we wanted to stay there forever. It was such a great place for families, but in spite of all the things we loved about living in Germany, we still felt very much American, and we wanted our children to be American as well. Only now, I also wanted them to be a little German too.

  I wanted Sophia to be able to walk to school every day by herself and go to the park with just her friends. I wanted Ozzie to have an einschulung that launched him into his school career. I wanted his first-grade experience to be full of play as well as learning. I wanted them both to grow up with selbständigkeit, to be able to make decisions for themselves, to believe what they wanted to believe, and to find their own path in life. I only hoped we could make that happen for them in the United States because things were quite different here when it came to raising children.

  We eventually found a house to rent near Zac’s new job in a suburban neighborhood in the far eastern reaches of the Bay Area. The house had a nice-sized backyard and an elementary school that was less than a mile away. There was even a park with a playground down the block. It looked like the ideal place for kids. Only after moving in, we couldn’t find any other children.

  When we first arrived, our neighbor Melissa went out of her way to introduce herself and her two children, which was nice, but after that, we didn’t see much of them. They were keeping their distance—out of politeness or a desire to keep their own privacy, I wasn’t sure. After a few days at our new home, I packed up a lunch and took the kids to the park down the street, intending to stay there for a while so Sophia and Ozzie would have a chance to meet some of the neighborhood kids.

  T
he playground at the park was empty. It had a plastic, multipurpose structure with two short wide slides. Ozzie dutifully climbed the short six-rung ladder and slid down one of them, slowly. The monkey bars were so low Sophia had to fold up her legs to avoid touching the ground. Within ten minutes, they were done playing there. I offered them sandwiches, and we ate our picnic under a tree looking out at the basketball court and the vast green playing field, both also empty. It was the middle of summer. Where were all the kids?

  We did see other children around town—at the community pool and on the sports fields playing Little League and soccer games. Occasionally, we heard them playing in fenced-in backyards on our street. It almost felt like they were sequestered from us. Apparently, access to the other kids required a special invitation, a playdate, which of course is arranged by parents. Because we were new and school hadn’t started yet, I hadn’t met any other parents. So my kids were friendless.

  Sophia and Ozzie found ways to amuse themselves, which was a good thing because I still needed to do some freelance work. I tried to find child care and camps in the United States, but I soon discovered that one week of camp in California cost more than three months of kita or hort in Berlin. I knew private child care would be pricey too, but I checked anyway through a local child-care network. The only spots available were in “home child-care” settings, where one caregiver watched fewer than eight kids at their personal residence. This wasn’t much better for my kids than staying home while I worked, and certainly not worth the cost.