School and Learning in Germany

In Germany several hundred thousand children are considered to be highly gifted. This however does not automatically mean they are academic high-flyers. On the contrary, highly gifted children often have an unnecessarily difficult time dealing with the education system.

The reports often tell the same old story. As is the case with Leon’s mother, a 34-year-old woman from Nuremberg. “Our son did not get off to a particularly good start at primary school,” she says in an Internet forum, “He had very high expectations for the start of his school career, but the reality soon turned out to be really quite sobering for him, if not downright frustrating.” The six-year-old is a gifted child – and after his first few days at school it was clear that not enough was being demanded of him. It was not until Leon was put in a special booster group that he was faced with the challenges he was in need of. Since then he has been attending the course for highly gifted children once a week. The children in this group, says Leon, “are different from the ones at primary school, they are at least normal and do not ask any weird questions” – this for him is obviously a really important criterion.

The Deutsche Gesellschaft für das hochbegabte Kind (German Society for the Gifted Child) estimates that there are about 300,000 gifted children in Germany. The Munich psychology professor and author of numerous works on the gifted, Kurt Heller, puts the number of gifted Germans – both children and adults – at about 800,000. The numbers vary somewhat as the experts sometimes take an IQ of 125 as their measure, sometimes it is an IQ of 130.

Varying statistics however are just one aspect of the problem, as became clear at a symposium called Bildung & Begabung (Education and Gifted Talent) that was held in Bonn in December 2011. It was there that Elke Völmicke, the managing director of Bildung & Begabung, reported about a current Allensbach survey that stated that 77 per cent of the parents asked had rated the support and promotion of disadvantaged children as “ particularly important” – in the case of gifted children however only 55 per cent advocated some form of special promotion and support. The answers given by teachers turned out to be particularly revealing, “58 per cent of those asked said that the targeted support of gifted children should quite definitely be available at a good school,” said Völmicke, “but only 17 per cent of the teachers asked ticked the box to say that this was the case at their school.”

The schools have to change

For gifted and highly gifted children it is usually a case of hit and miss, whether they are being sufficiently challenged at school. This is a situation that, in the opinion of many experts, ought to be changed as soon as possible. “Teenagers whose learning potential remains dormant at school do not get a second chance when they enter the working world,” as Elke Völmicke points out with reference to a survey on educational careers conducted by the Wissenschaftszentrum Berlin (Berlin Social Science Research Centre).

The schools have to change – this is also one of the conclusions drawn by Franz Kühmeyer, a trend researcher and strategy consultant in Vienna. “There are only three systems in the world in which people are judged on their attendance: factories, prisons and schools,” says Kühmeyer and sardonically adds, “Business is slowly already beginning to move away from this way of thinking.” The emphasis of attendance as an indicator, i.e. “having to clock in for education”, is in fact a highly unsuitable means of organising learning processes sensibly and above all of organising them in line with the talents of the learners.

The question of how schools can better organise learning processes for gifted children is one of the greatest challenges facing teachers and educational researchers at the moment. Jutta Billhardt, Chairperson at Hochbegabtenförderung e. V. (Support for the Gifted Society) advocates the following: “What we really need are special classes for gifted children, so that they can convert their intellectual potential into achievement within the framework of a community.” That is the wrong path to take contradicts Stephan Hussmann, educational researcher at the TU Dortmund: it is more important to respond to the different personal requirements within the learning group rather than just singling out particularly gifted children. “Empowering children means taking each of their individual positions seriously and getting them to let you accompany them for part of the way. And this applies to all pupils, whether they are big or small, slow or fast, fat or thin,” says Hussmann.

Education geared to the gifted

If we take a look at other countries, we soon see that promoting and supporting the gifted can quite easily be integrated into the regular school day. As Anne Sliwka from the Pädagogische Hochschule Heidelberg (Heidelberg University of Education) discovered when she visited a large number of schools in Canada, Scotland and USA. They were schools using cooperative learning programs, for example, mathematics lessons in which gifted pupils worked together to solve particularly sophisticated assignments and then spent time afterwards helping the less talented pupils. Although teachers have to develop some rather differentiated lesson plans for this, they in turn avoid particularly gifted pupils having to be sent away to boarding schools for the gifted.

According to Anne Sliwka a lot of these differentiation approaches could in fact be implemented in lessons without any great effort – and at some German schools are already being used. One of the examples the professor of education names are the “learning contracts” whose targets are set by the pupils themselves, or taking part in competitions as well as project-oriented lessons. “Focussing on the gifts, passions and talents of the individual pupil is at the same time a mandate for reforming the structure and the culture of the educational system,” affirms futurologist, Franz Kühmayer, “Education geared to the gifted is characterised by curiosity, creativity, enthusiasm and a willingness to perform.”

Advice for parents

The fact that the subject of giftedness cannot be reduced solely to mere teaching issues has been clearly pointed out by the psychologist, Dietrich Arnold, from the University of Trier. He considers the parents’ need for advice and support to be equally as important and justified – after all they are the ones who have the first contact with the gifted child and who have often gained a wealth of experience and knowledge long before the child goes to school – experience that teachers only gain after many years in the job.

“Every human being has so much potential – and it is the task of education systems to harness it and develop it,” says educational psychologist, Ulrike Stedtnitz, in a survey conducted by the Stifterverband für die Deutsche Wissenschaft (Donors’ Association for the Promotion of Humanities and Sciences in Germany). She went on to say, “We are doing neither children nor schools a favour if we stick to a static concept of giftedness – for example, a pupil’s IQ.” This is why the debate has to and will go on.