[em-bee]

agreed. the whole system is bonkers and screams of elitism. like you are either born smart or you'll never make it. fortunately there is also gesamtschule. which does away with that, there is no distinction between levels. only your grades have to be good enough by grade 10 to make it into the oberstufe (yrs 11-13).

i barely made it through, and i would not have made it without that because neither my parents nor me had any ambitions, so switching schools would not have worked for me.

when i was younger we moved around a lot. different problem but same result, i didn't make any friends in school because we kept witching schools. by the time we stayed in one location it was already to late.

[WA]

The other side of the coin is that you have ambitious kids in a class who are distracted and sometimes even bullied by kids with zero ambitions.

You think that's more fair to the ambitious kids when 2/3 of the class think it's cool to NOT learn anything and playing pecking order games all day?

[em-bee]

that's not the other side of the coin. that's the other end of the extreme. there are other solutions that can accommodate both needs. the problem with splitting up schools is that kids are not always ambitions and faster, nor always slower or lazy. that changes over time. a better system needs to have the flexibility to adjust for kids as they are developing and growing. switching schools back and forth is the worst way to achieve that. i'd rather find extracurriula activities that keep the kids interested than force them to switch schools. the problem is teacher training and an inflexible education system. the ability to switch schools does not make the system any more flexible.

a better school lets you choose a more or less academic focus if that is what the kids want.

the best system btw is montesori where kids really can learn at their own pace. it is designed in such a way that even within a class different kids work on different projects. they even mix ages so that younger ambitious kids can work with older ones.

[WA]

I agree on the needed flexibility part.

> the best system btw is montesori

I disagree on that. See a recent HN discussion on Montessori: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45674002

tl;dr: it works for some kids, just like the current German system works for some (other) kids.

[em-bee]

you may notice that i took an active part in that discussion.

tl;dr: montessori really does work for almost all kids, not just for some. the cases in the discussion where montessori didn't work don't provide any evidence that they actually received real montessori education as the name "montessori" is not protected.

[mlrtime]

>like you are either born smart or you'll never make it.

That is a bit dramatic. This topic has been talked about over and over. There is no perfect system. Treat everyone the same and high potential kids suffer. Split them up by ability and you get "unfairness" criticisms.

[em-bee]

the unfairness criticism is nonsense. it's just politics. and it doesn't even apply here because the existence of different school types would be unfair as well. splitting kids up by ability is not unfair. forcing them in different schools however is. because switching schools takes a lot of effort and it gets harder the older you get simply because the curriculum diverges to much. so even if i am bored in a lower tier school, i could not catch up to a higher tier one. for most kids the moment the school tier is chosen after grade 4, the kid is stuck in that tier, no matter how able the kid turns out to be.

merging school types is not about treating everyone the same, but it is about acknowledging that kids develop and you can't evaluate the ability of a child based on their performance at age 9.

as i said, i would not have made it in a tiered system because i would have been stuck in the lowest tier. my parents were to busy to argue with each other to even care and my performance suffered because of them.

those are circumstances a tiered system can't handle. a merged system that can deal with children at all levels however can, and that made the difference for me. that has nothing to do with treating all kids the same. on the contrary, it has everything to do with treating kids individually and not stuffing them in boxes like a tiered system does.

as for a perfect system, montessori gets pretty close. three years of age are grouped together in one class. that alone require that the kids in that class are not all treated the same. it allows all kids to learn at their own pace, so younger, faster kids can easily catch up to older kids and work with them or be given extra activities without disturbing other kids in the same class learning something else

[devilbunny]

All the levels of education at my high school happened in the same buildings. There were people in my graduating class of 86 people that I never said ten words to in six years in the same school. I was never in the same classes and didn’t live near them.

Which is to say that tracking of any kind is going to end up with this, whether they are separate physical schools or separate curricula within one school.

[em-bee]

i get your point, but i have a different experience. i also believe you are missing that once you made friends, switching tracks will only make it slightly more difficult to keep in touch. i didn't make many friends in school, but the friends i did make were not limited to my class and track. i can still see them during breaks, and we still share the same routes to and from school, ad we may still participate in the same extracurricular activities or clubs. those things would not change when switching tracks.

separate physical schools however may mean that i may never see some of these friends ever again. different school routes (even if we live in the same neighborhood). no chance to meet in breaks, etc. that's a whole different world.