Institutions

The Volkshochschule (VHS) is Germany’s biggest further-education provider, with 9.5 million people taking part in courses every year. More than ten per cent of the German population attend such courses. What used to be known as the university of the man in the street has become a service provider for life-long learning.

The VHS is a supermarket for holistic learning. Among the range on offer, there are courses to keep you fit and healthy, courses in painting and other forms of artistic expression, in foreign languages for your holiday, as well as courses enabling students to catch up on school-leaving qualifications or to acquire vocational qualifications for trade and industry. In addition, the VHS puts on lectures and other one-off events, especially on subjects of general political significance.

The programme offered by the one thousand independent Volkshochschulen varies according to local demand in the respective towns and districts. Their lasting popularity among more than ten per cent of the total population makes them the uncontested number one among the “independent” educational institutes, i.e. those that depend on voluntary participation. That is also true from an economic point of view. Participants cover 40 per cent of the costs through their participation fees. For many of them, these fees are an investment in their own future, as 85 per cent of all VHS customers are of working age.

Basis of every democratic society

Ulrich Aengenvoort, Director of the German Adult Education Association, is not complacent, however. Aengenvoort is in his mid-forties, and previously worked in consumer protection in the Federal Land Baden-Württemberg. He regrets that “We still have a stuffy image.” That is due to the success story of the VHS, which goes back more than 80 years. It began with Germany’s first republican constitution of 1919, which enshrined in the law state support for the education system. After all, education and knowledge among the population at large are the basis of any democratic society.

It continues to be a core concern of the VHS to provide special support for “the disadvantaged” or people who have been unlucky in life, although at first sight, that would not appear to promote a glossy image. The VHS often provides a last chance for mature students to acquire normal school-leaving qualifications, for example. Approximately 10,000 people gain such qualifications at the VHS each year. Half as many acquire higher “intermediary” qualifications, and a few hundred even acquire the qualifications required for university entrance. The VHS keeps its promise that “education is a civil right” even when other schools have sent prospective students packing.

Each year, the Volkshochschulen also provide integration courses for some quarter of a million immigrants from around the world and for resettled ethnic Germans from German enclaves in Eastern Europe in order to help them gain a better understanding of the language and culture in their new home. An example of best practice is the course “The Munich Volkshochschule’s Museum Visits.” Instead of teaching German as a foreign language in unattractive seminar rooms, the instructors take their students to see the great collections of art and technology in the Bavarian metropolis. In such a stimulating environment, the vocabulary and experience they acquire is considerably broader than that required for everyday and vocational purposes. The German Adult Education Association, the academic reference institution for the Volkshochschulen, was so impressed that it awarded the programme its innovation prize this year.

A change of image

The most recent innovation at the German Adult Education Association, both in terms of its content and its medium, is Apoll, an Internet portal intended to enable people who are illiterate to sit by themselves at a computer and overcome their difficulties with reading, writing and arithmetic. This unique initiative is directed at some four million people, a good six per cent of Germany’s total population.

Aengenvoort, the VHS’s chief strategist, believes it must generally transform itself in the future from being “an organiser of classroom instruction” to becoming a multimedia provider of opportunities to learn anytime and anywhere. For cost reasons, the lessons and exercises required to make this possible can only be produced for large markets, which means at least for the whole of the Adult Education Association. “We not only need private partners from the media industry here, for example publishers,” says the Association’s Director. A first example is “VHS Campus” for foreign languages, English and Spanish in the first instance. Computer-based learning is supplemented by seminars at local Volkshochschulen, the usual practice on all distance-learning courses.

Will more e-learning standardise the thousand different Volkshochschulen? Aengenvoort gives a flowery answer: “They will certainly remain a colourful bouquet, but the different colours will be more similar.”