From Innovation Leader to Educational Decline: Germany’s Growing Crisis

According to a study commissioned by UNICEF, only 60 percent of 15-year-olds in Germany still possess a “minimum level of competence” in reading and mathematics. The German daily newspaper “Die Welt” commented: “In plain language, this means that 40 percent are almost illiterate and do not master the basic arithmetic operations. This places us 34th out of the 41 countries surveyed. It is a catastrophe.”

At War with Mathematics

At the same time, the newspaper reports, academic standards are being continuously lowered. Recently, several German states removed long division and decimal calculations from mathematics lessons in elementary schools. One reason given was that students made too many mistakes when dividing numbers. Responding to criticism, Lower Saxony’s Minister of Education, Julia Willie Hamburg, made the amusing remark that simplifying mathematics instruction represented a “scientifically based further development of mathematical education.”

The minister belongs to the Green Party, whose supporters are notoriously uncomfortable with mathematics. This was one of the findings of a survey conducted by the Allensbach Institute for Public Opinion Research, in which 1,118 representative Germans aged 16 and older were asked: “Which subjects were you good at in........

© Townhall