Primary school failure forces us to return to successful learning methods

In all of Germany’s federal states the performance of primary school pupils has declined

by Rainer Werner*

(16 January 2023) The study by the “Institute for Quality Development in Education” (IQB) on the performance of our primary school students in mathematics and German (2021) has revealed alarming results.

In all 16 federal states, performance has declined compared to the test results of 2011 (in spelling: 2016). What is particularly alarming is that the number of high-achieving pupils has declined just as much as the number of those who achieve the average standard.

Bavaria and Saxony still hold the top position, but student performance has also deteriorated in these states. As in previous years, Bremen and Berlin are bottom of the class. Brandenburg has recently joined the two notorious losers. Its pupils’ performance has fallen to that of the last two states.

The results in spelling show how glaring the failure of primary school pupils [4 to 9 year olds, edit.] is. In Bremen, 42.0% of pupils do not reach the minimum standard, in Berlin it is 46.1% and in Brandenburg 45.7%. The minimum standard in spelling marks the dividing line between literacy and illiteracy.

Study without causal research

The study does not provide any information on the causes of the nationwide failure of primary school pupils because, as the head of the study, Petra Stanat of the IQB, emphasises, it does not provide any explanatory knowledge, but only the pure performance findings. If one searches for explanations on the basis of the study’s results, one soon comes up against their limits.

For example, the number of hours German is taught in primary schools varies from state to state. However, it does not correspond to the respective ranking of the state in terms of pupil performance.

If the drop in performance has affected all federal states and even the long-time winners Bavaria and Saxony have been caught in the downward spiral, there must be a powerful trend at work that has taken hold in the classrooms of our schools. I suspect it has to do with the hedonistic cultural shift in the wake of which student-friendly learning was introduced. In the process, one pronoun has been used in a most inflationary way, namely “self”.

No textbook or pedagogical handout should be without a combination of words containing this magic word: self-awareness, self-realisation, self-direction and self-efficacy. “Self-organised learning” has pedagogical and political advocates galore, although it has never been tested whether the pedagogical promise was actually kept.

The quality studies by the Institute for Quality Development in Education (IQB) prove the opposite. As Friedrich Schiller says in “Wallenstein’s Death”: “The world is narrow, broad the mind – thoughts dwell easily side by side. Things collide violently in space.”

Overwhelmed by heterogeneity

What is wrong with our primary schools? Why do they fail to provide the majority of pupils [4 to 9 years of age, edit.] with a solid foundation in German and mathematics? To answer this question, you have to take a look at the entrance classes. Since the primary school is a local school, children with different perceptions, intellectual abilities and learning attitudes attend school together.

The gap ranges from Elisa from an academic family, who can already read and write when she starts school, to Tarek from a Syrian family, who can only speak fragments of German. In addition, the secondary virtues are differently developed among learners.

Not all of the children learned at home to concentrate on a task at hand and to persevere even in the face of difficult challenges. Discipline, diligence and a sense of order are also not instilled in every child. The ability to take a back seat in a group, to curb one’s own ego, also depends very much on the parenting style. However, evidence from research on learning shows it is precisely these “soft factors” that determine learning success.

The parental home influences children’s start in life

As we know today, the disadvantages children can face begin very early. If a pregnant woman frequently listens to classical music, the newborn develops a sense of rhythm early on which is a precursor to musicality. If small children are regularly read to, they develop a differentiated speaking ability and already write amazingly good texts in primary school.

If, in the parental home, a child experiences their parents talking and discussing a lot, this linguistic ability is transferred to the child. He or she becomes verbally skilled and self-confident at arguing on his or her own behalf. A child that receives praise and encouragement while discovering the world through play, later on also develops curiosity and ambition when learning at school.

If you consider the opposite of all these stimulating incentives, you can appreciate how profound and lasting the handicaps and deficits children have to contend with who grow up in educationally deprived homes. Even in primary school, they sit in the rearmost carriage of the convoy.

Problematic learning methods

The crucial question for parents is: can primary school still compensate for these deficits? According to everything we know about compensatory education, it can only do so to a very limited extent. Above all, it cannot do so if the teachers resort to didactic concepts that promise little success. It is obvious even to the non-specialist that teaching in primary schools must be differentiated because the learning prerequisites of the children are too varied.

The fashionable principle of individual learning – each pupil works through the tasks independently – is admittedly only suitable for pupils who have an alert mind and the ability to organise themselves. The weak learners get lost in the self-learning method because they need the support of the teacher who guides them step by step to solve the tasks.

“Cross-grade learning”, where children from different grades are taught together, has also fallen into disrepute. Especially primary schools in deprived areas have abandoned it because the older pupils were overwhelmed in the teacher’s role and made little learning progress themselves. The best differentiation method, the grouping of pupils of equal ability in homogeneous learning groups, is used too rarely because it is suspected of “selection” by progressive education politicians and pedagogues.

Individualised learning is overrated

In individualised learning, children are supposed to learn in a “self-discovery” or “self-directed” way. Teachers are only needed as learning guides and animators. The important teacher-pupil relationship falls by the wayside, the class community degenerates, the children become lone fighters.

Sceptical academics state that only children from the educated middle-class benefit from self-learning methods because they have the necessary prior knowledge and can organise the learning process independently. On the other hand, children from socially disadvantaged families or from migrant families need the helping and explaining hand of the teacher.

Hermann Giesecke, the doyen of German didactics, who died in 2021, makes a critical judgement: “Almost everything that modern school pedagogy considers progressive disadvantages children from educationally distant backgrounds. [...] In particular, it is the socially disadvantaged child who needs old-fashioned, directly guided, but also patient and encouraging instruction in order to free itself from this status.”

This criticism is shared by many teachers as well. They criticise self-learning methods for depersonalising teaching and robbing it of its most important productive force – the emotional teacher-student relationship.

The didactic trend has virtually eliminated an important form of learning, the Socratic Method, the questioning-developing classroom dialogue. In this form of learning, the teacher approaches the students as a competent, technically and pedagogically experienced expert. He explains a subject clearly and encourages the pupils in their learning efforts, which they complete in individual, partner or group work.

Parents’ criticism of self-learning concepts goes in the same direction. They report that their children feel left alone for long periods in this form of learning. Weaker pupils are so intimidated by the fast learners who nimbly move through the learning material at the different levels that they refrain from seeking the teacher’s help out of shame. Apparently, the many enthusiastic advocates of open learning have not realised that they are cheering on an elite project.

“It’s the language, silly!”

Up and down the country, education experts and politicians proclaim that mastering the German language is the key to success in school. No one will seriously contradict this insight. The evidence is too overwhelming that children who speak only broken German when they start school are at a considerable disadvantage in their school careers. They perform worse in all subjects than their intelligence would suggest because German is the language of instruction in all subjects except foreign languages.

Despite this finding, some federal states are lax in their approach to early German language acquisition. All states except Hamburg have abolished the pre-school, which specifically prepared pupils with language deficits for one year for school entrance. Henceforth, kindergartens were to take over the compensatory function of pre-school. Bremen wanted to reintroduce pre-school in 2021 after the poor performance of its pupils in comparative tests. However, the resistance in the SPD [Social Democratic Party, edit.] was too great.

The argument of the preschool opponents is illuminating. “From our point of view, this proposal contradicts the basic idea of inclusion, which is central to the character of Bremen’s education system. Pre-schools would represent a new selection based on performance.” (Young Socialists, 2021). Thus, the killer argument of selection must be used to sabotage a meaningful support measure. In Bremen in particular, there is an urgent need to improve the starting chances for migrant children.

Once again, Bavaria is following a successful path here. After the abolition of pre-school, special German language support was introduced in “pre-courses”, which are compulsory for children of foreign origin without sufficient German language skills.

A fiasco occurred – how could it be otherwise – in Berlin. According to school law, children who do not attend a day-care centre must take a language test. If this determines a need for support, the children must attend three hours of language support every day.

In 2018, out of 2000 children whose parents were contacted, only 650 took the language test. Of the 470 children who did not pass the test, only 50 ended up in the language support lessons. Big effort, little return. Not a single fine was imposed on the tardy parents. The criticism from the capital’s press was caustic: Typical Berlin! Once again, there are no consequences for breaking the law.

Practice is frowned upon as drill

It always amazes one to read letters from people who went to school at the beginning of the 20th century. They write in an almost flawless German. Often they only attended the “Volksschule” (as basic primary and secondary school was then called) with only eight years of schooling. They learned correct German because practising spelling rules was done with a persistence that “student-focused” educators would today stigmatise as drill or inhuman training.

Perhaps the didacticians of old knew or suspected more about the nature of our brain than we want to give them credit for from today’s perspective. Physiological brain research is of the opinion that what we call powers of retention arises from the stimulation of the synapses, the neural junctions between the brain cells. The ability to remember depends not only on the intensity of the learning impulse, but also on its frequency.

Translated into the language of didactics, this means that sustainable learning can be achieved through clear teaching methods, but also through constant repetitive practice of what has already been learned. Why should we call drill that which our own brain tells us is a promising learning method? It is time for teachers to take a stand against the unscientific disparagement of practicing.

Problem subject mathematics

Educators from the French Research Institute for Mathematics Education (IREM) set primary school pupils the following task: there are 26 sheep and 10 goats on a ship. How old is the captain? Of the 97 children, 76 actually calculated a result, i.e. more than three quarters. Most of them came up with 36 years. The example shows that these children lacked mathematical understanding, blindly handling the given numbers and mixing them up into an illogical calculation.

Why do so many primary school children fail in maths? Maths requires logical thinking, it is about right and wrong. The correct solution is not negotiable. This is alienating for many students because in most subjects they have become accustomed to seeing it one way or the other. Also, fun concepts that are so popular in other subjects do not work in mathematics because here you have to think, and that involves effort.

However, a culture of effort has been on the decline in school learning for years. Michael Felten, a maths teacher and author, attributes the poor performance of students in this subject to an indulgence that begins at home and continues at school. Felten speaks of “emotional spoiling” and means by this “the widespread parental attitude of making life as pleasant as possible for their little treasures, of getting difficulties out of their way as much as possible”.

In mathematics, however, it is a matter of making a mental effort to try something out, and in doing so, also accepting wrong turns and disappointments. This willingness to make an effort must be created in the parental home through an intellectually stimulating upbringing. The attitude of many parents to brag about their own weak maths performance in front of their children, has also proved unhelpful. This gives their offspring the impression that eventually maths is not really important because they can get through life just fine without a good performance in this subject.

In all PISA studies, Japanese pupils did particularly well in mathematics. German education experts tried to find the secret of this success and found it: only excellently trained teachers teach in Japanese primary schools. In contrast to Germany, teaching outside your subject area is frowned upon. All tasks contain a challenging problem that is connected to reality. Finding and trying out solutions is just as important as the solution itself. In this way, mathematical understanding is awakened in the children.

Whereas in Germany schools advertise that homework has been abolished, in Japan’s schools the homework load is large. The children receive a lot of support from their parents and siblings. Without persistent practice, maths miracles are not to be expected.

Scientific evidence is needed

In medicine, it is a matter of course that therapies and medicines are constantly being improved in order to achieve the best healing results for patients. Hordes of scientists at university or private-sector institutes are researching for optimal products. Why has educational science not yet managed to refute the beliefs that determine action in educational policy with valid facts?

Teachers know from experience that learning outcomes are better in homogeneous learning groups than in heterogeneous ones. They also know that self-learning methods do not lead to the desired success for the majority of pupils.

Science could give this practical knowledge the seal of evidence. No education policy-maker would then be able to impose learning methods on pupils that have failed the evidence test. The winners would be the pupils.

If children experience failure as early as primary school, they will lose the incentive to learn in the long run. Failure at the beginning of their school career puts a burden on them that they carry with them until they leave school, far too often without graduating.

We should do everything we can to improve primary school teaching so that we can talk about a real foundation for pupils’ school careers.

* Rainer Werner taught German and history at a Berlin grammar school. He is the author of the book “Fluch des Erfolgs. Wie das Gymnasium zur ‘Gesamtschule light’ mutiert“.

Source: CICERO-online, 5 December 2022
Reprinted with kind permission of the author.

(Translation “Swiss Standpoint”)