Was East German Education a Victim of West German 'Colonisation' after Unification?

Abstract

German unification took place very rapidly, and it is sometimes argued that East German education was colonised in a process according to which ideas and structures (some of which were not very successful in the West) were foisted on the East in the cause of unity and homogeneity. This paper argues that the 'victim/colonisation' hypothesis is exaggerated. There was a suppressed reform tendency in the German Democratic Republic (GDR) that resulted in several distinctive educational institutions in the New Bundesländer. Although it is true that a controversial divided secondary school structure replaced the GDR unified school, it was the East Germans themselves who clamoured for the grammar school without paying sufficient attention to the implications for those pupils who failed to obtain entry into it. Their suspicions that their most able children were under-achieving were not validated by empirical studies. To a certain degree, reverse transformation can be observed (influence from East to West). In the field of pre-school education and childcare, for example, the spectacle of a well-developed sector in the East made the Westerners realise that they themselves had no adequate policy or strategy so they began to develop one. The Wisssenschaftsrat (Higher Education Council) too drew attention to the efficiency of the GDR higher education system, and in certain respects is striving to emulate it in the Old Bundesländer. The conviction of having been 'colonised' feeds resentment that could result in a backlash against democratic values. The paper ends with a brief discussion of the implications of the colonisation hypothesis for citizenship.