Germans address problems in school systems

FRANKFURT, Germany -- It sounds like every child's dream: only four-and-a-half hours of school a day, no attendance taken, a free day if a teacher is sick, no punishment for playing hooky.\nBut this is no dream, as Germans have suddenly awakened to discover; it's the sorry state of their schools.\nGermany's education system, like its economy, was once considered the pride of Europe. Worries about the stagnating economy have recently preoccupied Germans, and now they are realizing their schools are also in trouble.\nThings have gotten so bad that not only parents are complaining. Even some high school students grumble that it's hard to take school seriously.\nThe system reaped praise after World War II for turning out fine shipbuilders and metalworkers. But such vocational training is out of step with the modern and more flexible needs of service-oriented or technical professions.\nAlso, a 1950s era assumption that mothers are home afternoons to help their children with homework has ceased to hold true as German women enter the work force. So instead of learning after school, many kids are goofing off or getting into trouble.\nThe real wake-up call came last year when an international test of 15-year-old ranked Germany 21st out of 32 leading industrialized nations in reading, mathematics and science.\nSouth Korea, Japan and Finland led in all three fields of the Program for International Student Assessment test in 2000, conducted every three years by the Paris-based Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. U.S. students came in 15th.\nChancellor Gerhard Schroeder's government has responded by pledging $4 billion over the next five years to create all-day programs for elementary and secondary schools, improve teacher training and revamp classwork to encourage skills instead of rote learning.\nSchroeder, whose wife, Doris Schroeder-Koepf, spends afternoons helping her 11-year-old daughter, Klara, with homework, wants 10,000 more schools to offer extra hours. Currently there are 1,800 -- just 6 percent of the total.\nThe Meisterschule in the blue-collar Frankfurt neighborhood of Sindlingen has offered afternoon classes in art, music and sports, as well as tutoring, since the 1970s.\n"We felt the children needed more time together with their teachers, more time to really concentrate on learning and encourage their development," Principal Waltraud Schrader said.