[hedvig]

>Do they plan on staying in Germany using their degree?

Ah - you betray yourself here. I thought you said it was just that they didn't speak the language, not that they were foreigners in a precarious situation, to be undeserving of a certain education. I guess I'm lucky that I live in the U.S. where we've had to deal with integration of various peoples from the start and have made peace with the fact that policies that end up excluding a certain group can indeed be called racist if the effect is so. Despite its contrition over the past perhaps Germany still has some growing to do.

[cf141q5325]

I would recommend reading again what i wrote, its not that i view anyone as undeserving but that a German crashcouse doesnt benefit you if you are back in Afghanistan in a year. German is not a valuable skill. Speaking English or you know, Pashto, is.

The system simply assumes people will be staying, reality looks different. If entering the German school system is something you want to do, the current system is still nonsense. It assumes people will be able to learn a second language overnight and comprehend the course material in a language they dont speak in the same time as people whos first language this is. For that more time is simply needed.

[bayesian_horse]

You fail to understand that those children are equal in all of their rights to native children. It's not possible for the state to act as if their forced deportation into hopelessness or early death is already predetermined.

There is extreme reluctance to put children into "special schools" or classes. For one thing, they don't exist. For another, such separation is almost impossible without putting those children at a disadvantage, even if there is no intention to somehow keep them away from natives.

And then that's also the connection to the US situation, where they actually had segregated schools and decided that this is impossible.

[Goladus]

> connection to the US situation

Tenuous at best. That was a different place and a different time. Different circumstances, different timelines, different politics, and even different differences.

Brown vs Board of Education was decided based on the 14th Amendment to the Constitution, which was specifically enacted after the Civil War to deal with the emancipation of slaves. Meanwhile during that same timeframe (1890s) governments of former confederate states sought to impose segregation laws clearly designed to oppress and disenfranchise blacks. The legal justification for these racially discriminatory laws was the "Separate but Equal" doctrine laid out by Plessy vs Ferguson.

So by the time of Brown v Board you had a substantial black population who spoke English and had been in the US for over a century(The 1790 census reported 17.8% of the US population was enslaved). You had a history of state governments enacting discriminatory laws clearly motivated by racism. You had legally mandated segregation in all aspects of life, not just schools.

It was not a case of sudden mass migration over a span of less than 10 years. And while you did have some ethnic differences, there wasn't a major language barrier. Furthermore, many of what you might call ethnic differences at the time (such as lower literacy levels) were substantially a consequence of slavery and discriminatory laws in the first place.

[bayesian_horse]

The connection I was referring to is that we exactly don't want to produce "special" schools.

Also there is a long history of "expecting" lower performance from certain ethnic minorities in Germany, putting them into the "special needs" category extremely easily.

I suspect that parallels to the situation in the US go a lot deeper still. But people aren't paying close enough attention yet and somehow believe that with our constitution discrimination is impossible and so all disadvantages must be the immigrants' fault by default.

[cf141q5325]

You fail to understand that i dont want to infringe on anyones opportunity. I am saying plain and simply, if a kid is staying a year in this country during the asylum process, trying to integrate them into a system that doesnt benefit them in any way, and doing that on the cost of their education, is just not fair towards the children. This is not an abstract concept, like the kid from my elementary class this is happening already all the time. That kid was pressured from his parents to make the best of the school but he, naturally had to learn the language first. No one ever asked of that 8 year old would not be better off today if he had learned Pashto or English in that year. Thats what we currently do to those kids. Its not racism, its just being horrible. We are in my option not providing adequate education with kids stuck in the asylum process. Instead they, and every other kid whos first language isnt German are thrown in a "one system fits all" system that is grinding them down because they are starting at a major deficit due to the language barrier. And that is insane. Switching the language of you education midway through means in reality either delaying the education, (which is not a problem in Germany where you finish by passing the grade, but it is in Afgahnistan where you are expected to work from a certain age) or forcing more content on children then they can handle. I cant repeat it enough, but our school system is designed in a way to teach kids all you can teach them in that timespan. Everything additional, is putting stress on those kids.

>There is extreme reluctance to put children into "special schools" or classes.

https://sportsmediachallenge.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/...

Where the difference in view might come from, i do care about the people stuck in that horrible system instead of the way it is framed. I dont know what another perspective then "what aid can we offer the people stuck in that situation" really helps anyone but your ego. How anyone can construct an addition schoolyear to learn the language as racism is really beyond me.

[bayesian_horse]

An extra school year to learn a language sounds indeed harmless. But we don't have the schools or the teachers for that. We don't have the legal framework, so all of it would need to be voluntary.

It's completely ridiculous and impractical for the state to teach Pashtu to Afghan children in Germany. For English it is almost as bad. Also, learning German does help you learn English, and exposure to different languages does actually make subsequent language learning easier. Multilingualism is not a zero-sum game.

School education is not like a downloadable Database. If it were, it would be more efficient to teach them all the 13 years of stuff at age 18, because that's when they learn fastest. If it were all about usable knowledge (or skills) we should not teach arts, gymn, philosophy or music. Biology and History would also be on the brink for most children.

But it isn't. And yes, it would be nice to help them more specifically, but that's easier said than done. Since we can't recruit a few thousand non-existing experts on the fly, the existing teachers have to deal with it.