INTERNATIONAL STORY conditions. And then the district gets planned by others. But it is precisely such long-term plans that are decisive. So, poverty as a problem of democracy. Another example: those who grow up poor do not want to change society, but only their place in society. Those who grow up wealthy want to change or at least shape society. That’s why social movements like “Fridays for Future” will always have problems encouraging disadvantaged people to join in. In your book, you anaFFlyze how children from poor families cope at school. The experiences you mention play a role there, too. If you’re always asking yourself what the point of something is and how it can help you, you’ll hardly have any motivation for half of the subjects at school. Traditionally, education in Germany is not supposed to be functional, but an end in itself. It’s a nice ideal, but it shouldn’t be taken for granted. Instead, children should first be taught to learn something for the sake of learning. To stay with your model: how would that help the children? We see from long-term studies that those investments that are of no immediate benefit are extremely useful to children in the long run. You could say, for example, that learning a musical instrument only makes sense if you want to become a musician. But indirectly, you learn a huge amount that you need for your future life and for success at school. For example? You learn to make an effort, even if only sounds right at the end of a lengthy process. And you learn that you have to practise alone, to be able to make music with others as a team, later on. The learning of a musical instrument is currently distributed extremely unequally in society, depending on how wealthy the parents are. That’s why it would make a great deal of sense for all children at all-day schools in Germany to learn a musical instrument. In Hamburg, depending on the social composition of the parent community, schools receive different amounts of money, for example, for smaller classes or for education specialists. Is that enough to make up for the disadvantages? It definitely makes sense. You have to compensate because, for a variety of reasons, parents aren’t able to support their children in the same way that parents at other schools can. It would also be exceptionally bad if children were experiencing shortages at school, too, and the teachers themselves were behaving like insolvency administrators. Children must be given the opportunity to spend a long time, voluntarily, in a very well-equipped school. In this way, the routine of shortage management can be broken, and that pattern of thinking can be prevented from becoming part of your personality as an adult. Otherwise, you’ll likely be stuck with it for the rest of your life. So the effects of poverty can be mitigated at school. But wouldn’t it make much more sense to remedy shortages among the families and use the money to ease their poverty, instead of investing it in schools? Our society systematically allows child poverty. It doesn’t provoke it, but it does very little to prevent children from growing up in circumstances in which they barely get adequate support. It only steps in if children are already poor and then tries to alleviate the situation somewhat. Of course, it would be best if children didn’t grow up in conditions of structural privation. But that wouldn’t exempt schools from offering something on an all-day basis, because many parents still wouldn’t be able to support their children in the same way. PHOTO BY RENE BERNAL ON UNSPLASH During the pandemic, children from poor families were hit particularly hard by school closures. In compensation, students in Hamburg have had to sit fewer exams for their first and intermediate school-leaving exams in the past two years, to give them more time to catch up. Schools have also been offering voluntary “learning holidays” and other remedial courses. Is that sufficient? There’s no harm in any of that. Whether it’ll have a positive effect remains to be seen, but it certainly isn’t sufficient. All the studies show that not all of the children and young people suffered from the pandemic conditions in the same way. The younger and the more disadvantaged the pupils are, the greater their learning arrears. So they’re the greatest for poor children in primary schools. The pandemic has also resulted in the migration background of children becoming much more important, because they often only learn to speak German outside the home. What happens to these children now? You can’t have all children repeating their classes, as we have neither the teachers nor the rooms for that. Almost all of them will be transferred. The learning arrears are a big problem for them, because in maths lessons, for example, everything is interlinked, and knowledge of past content is assumed. So we will see more and more young people in the 9th and 10th grades who no longer understand anything in maths. This needs to be countered, but it’s far from having happened to any satisfactory degree. If you could choose one measure to combat injustice at school, what would it be? From 2026, the right to an all-day place at primary school will be put into practice. If I could choose just one thing, I would provide primary schools with the means to create extremely good frameworks for all-day teaching—and then successively extend that comprehensive all-day teaching to the higher grades. To iron out disadvantages, treat unequal things unequally, because if you treat everyone equally, you perpetuate the existing inequality. Those who come from unfavourable conditions must, therefore, be given special and targeted support. This can be achieved with wellequipped all-day schools that are able to respond to the children individually. ■ Aladin El-Mafaalani is a sociologist and chair of Pedagogy and Education in Migration Society at the University of Osnabrück. He has published several books on education and migration. In “Myth of Education”, he deals with the problems of the German education system. Further info: www.mafaalani.de Translated from German via Translators without Borders Courtesy of Hinz&Kunzt / International Network of Street Papers DONATE YOUR CAR! Need to get rid of your car, truck, or motorcycle? Consider donating it to Denver VOICE. Call (855) 500-7433, or go to: careasy.org/nonprofi t/denver-voice. Your donation helps Denver VOICE succeed in its mission to provide individuals experiencing homelessness or poverty the chance towards a more stable life. 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