I sat last night and watched a short German news piece on private schools. There's a trend underway, which doesn't get discussed much.
Back in 2000, roughly 5.5-percent of schools in Germany were private. Today, it's 11-percent.
In fact, if you go to the German state of Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, it's now reached 19-percent.
So, what's going on? There are two basic elements.....the middle-to-upper-class crowd have the money and can afford to send their kid off to these schools, and there is the belief that they do a better job than public schools.
Critics of this concept believe that it's dividing society and making the case that the public school are 'crappy'.
Around a dozen years ago, I had to go over to my son's public school (in the K-town region). This was a building that was outdated, in bad shape, and just about to undergo a renovation. They figured that the renovation would take two years, and with their timing, my son wouldn't see the end-result. It was a building built in the 1950s, other than heating improvements and maybe a coat of paint done once or twice over the next fifty years.....it was the same basic building. They were at least a dozen years behind in improvement planning.
A lot of Germans talk about school infrastructure, and it's generally negative discussions.
The odds that this trend will continue to move upward? It's more than likely, and the public school crowd face some stiff competition now.
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