Repainting The Little Red Schoolhouse: A History Of Eastern German Education, 1945-1995

Repainting the Little Red Schoolhouse This page intentionally left blank REPAINTING THE LITTLE RED SCHOOLHOUSE A HISTORY OF EASTERN GERMAN EDUCATION, 1945 –1995 John Rodden 1 2002 1 Oxford New York Athens Auckland Bangkok Bogota´ Buenos Aires Cape Town Chennai Dar es Salaam Delhi Florence Hong Kong Istanbul Karachi Kolkata Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Mumbai Nairobi Paris Sa˜o Paulo Shanghai Singapore Taipei Tokyo Toronto Warsaw and associated companies in Berlin Ibadan Copyright 2002 by John Rodden Published by Oxford University Press, Inc. 198 Madison Avenue, New York, New York 10016 Oxford is a registered trademark of Oxford University Press, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of Oxford University Press. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Rodden, John. Repainting the little red schoolhouse : a history of Eastern German education, 1945–1995 / John Rodden. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-19-511244-X 1. Education—Germany (East)—History. 2. Communism and education—Germany (East) 3. Educational change—Germany. I. Title. LA772.R56 1999 370'.943'1—dc21 98-30620 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper For Beth, a utopian friend, whose loving support, tender care, and untold contributions are woven throughout these pages. This page intentionally left blank The human being can only become human by education. He is merely what education makes of him. Immanuel Kant, Education This page intentionally left blank Acknowledgments Before the fall of the Berlin Wall, few Americans had ever peeked inside the walls of an East German school. Almost all educational institutions were closed to western researchers, except when official approval came down from high-ranking functionaries at the Ministry of Education in East Berlin. So my trips to eastern German schools, universities, and cultural institutes, which began shortly before reunification occurred in October 1990, often felt like wondrous voyages of discovery. I had read about East Germany for decades and had tried, unsuccessfully, to visit its schools on a previous trip to West Germany. But now the Wall was down, now the frontier was open. Now, in the dying days of the DDR, I could venture at will across the border into that unknown territory that most younger western Germans had never visited—and, as reunification neared, still had little desire to know. I soon discovered, however, that my first task would be to confront and discard my own stereotypes, both romantic and sinister. An American eastener newly transplanted to Texas, I was much taken by the frontier imagery in the western German media’s portrayal of “the wild East,” as they called the formerly closed society of the DDR. My own spirited desire to do pioneering research on the frontier of the Cold War was made all the more challenging by the black-hat caricatures of the DDR still alive to my older relatives at home, for whom “East Germany” (crudely symbolized by the impenetrable “Wall”) evoked the terrible totalitarian images of “Nazi Germany” and “Communist Germany” combined. Their vaguely uneasy remarks suggesting that my expedition was an ill-fated quest—a sort of “Heart of Darkness” journey destined to end in some kind of “Darkness at Noon” cum “High Noon” showdown—lent my enterprise a touch of the quixotic and utopian. The actual experience of visiting eastern German schools and interviewing their students and staff proved both more temperate and less alien than my safari fantasies had conjured. Above all, my conversations demystified