Only going to school until 1 p.m., I think would be a dream for every American high school student, but it is a normal day for most German students.
In Germany, the education rules are made by the 16 German states. The number of years you have to go to school differs from 12 to 13 years and depends where you live.
The biggest difference between the German and the U.S. school system is that in Germany we know that after elementary school, the students are divided by their performance level to go to different schools.
There is the “Hauptschule,” which focuses on a vocational-oriented education and preparing students for apprenticeships. In the “Realschule,” there is a mixture of a general and vocational education. A more academically rigorous path is in the “Gymnasium,” which prepares the students for university and the “Gesamtschule” brings all together. Between the schools, you can always change, but it is easier to go down a level than up (Gymnasium to Gesamtschule to Realschule to Hauptschule).
After 9th or 10th grade, students decide if they want to do an apprenticeship, which means that they work half the week and the other half are going to vocational school. They do this for three years or three years of school, which is called “Abitur.” You need to have an Abitur certificate in order to go to a university. The first year of the Abitur is for preparation, getting used to the system and repetitions. The grades for the other two years are counted with the final exams to an overall grade. The final exam consists of three or four written essay exams, which last four to five hours and one oral exam.
Abitur is offered in some Realschulen und Gesamtschulen, but it is not as focused on it than at Gymnasims, where the students have been preparing for it since fifth grade.
Another difference is the grade system. For the first nine or 10 years of school it consists of a scale from 1 to 6, where 1 is the best. For the Abitur it changed to a 1 to 15 point system, where 15 is the best.
In Germany, we also can’t choose our classes as much as in the U.S. Everyone has to take approximately 14 classes in a year, and we have to take Biology, Chemistry and Physics every year since fifth grade. An example for classes we can choose is our second foreign language, but at some schools there is a larger selection than at others. I could just choose between French and Latin.
Because of the 14 classes every year, we don’t have the same classes every day. And because of my 13 years of school I often have classes until 1 p.m., but sometimes until 3 p.m.
These short days are important because in Germany we don’t have sports or theater in our school. If you want to do something like that, you have to do it after school.
In Germany, we also don’t have homeschooled children because we have a law that every child has to go to school through the ages of 6 to 18.
The difference between the school system in Germany and the U.S. are really big.
