By Sabine BEPPLER-SPAHL

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Post-war German education once stood for intellectual rigour. Today, feelings trump facts, ideology replaces enquiry, and political conformity stifles critical thinking.

Germany’s school system is in crisis, not only due to declining standards, but also because education is being systematically transformed into ideological indoctrination. Many parents sense this troubling shift, and while open protest remains rare, discontent with the education system is growing.

The numbers tell the story. In the 1980s and 1990s, private schools were considered inferior options for students who were struggling. Today, however, they offer a welcome alternative to an increasingly corrupt system. Around 12% of schools in Germany are now private, despite substantial fees, and there are long waiting lists. Parents are increasingly abandoning a public system they no longer trust.

This exodus from state education coincides with alarming drops in performance. One-third of German pupils now fail to meet the minimum requirements for basic skills such as reading and mathematics—a “worrying development” that has prompted education officials to raise concerns. Yet, confidence in politicians’ ability to address these problems has reached an all-time low, as surveys show—and with good reason.

The multicultural mandate

The root causes extend beyond the obvious challenge of language barriers. According to 2024 studies, over 40% of pupils now have migrant backgrounds. While mass migration has undoubtedly put pressure on the system, acknowledging this uncomfortable truth would force policymakers to confront the consequences of their own decisions.

More insidious still is the fact that schools have become battlegrounds for cultural engineering. The 2015 refugee crisis accelerated a shift away from traditional education towards ‘cultural empowerment’ and relativistic thinking. A 2015 study, supported by the Commissioner for Migration, criticised textbooks for assuming “the German perspective as the norm,” asking, ”How can textbooks promote inclusive language?”

The idea of an assimilationist model of education, based on the notion that all students, including those from migrant backgrounds, can benefit from a liberal, topic-oriented curriculum, was dismissed as outdated and harmful. Even worse, German children are now taught to view their own culture with suspicion while embracing fashionable causes without question.

The result of this moral confusion is evident everywhere: almost all German schools display ‘Schools without Racism’ placards. To earn this label, 70% of members of the school community must pledge to combat ‘all forms of discrimination’ and hold regular ‘project days’ on approved topics. The implicit message is that schools without such explicit anti-racist awareness are on the verge of becoming hotspots of discrimination. It seems that it is no longer enough for schools to simply not be racist—they must resort to cheap, top-down anti-racist symbolism. As educational standards collapse, virtue signalling flourishes.

Ideological indoctrination in textbooks

Perhaps nowhere is ideological corruption more evident than in climate education. A recent investigation by Die Welt revealed that textbooks often manipulate scientific facts to support a particular narrative. According to science journalist Axel Bojanowski, the main aim is to instil fear of global warming in children and young people. Some schools use a WDR public broadcaster-developed “Augmented Reality” app, which allows pupils to experience burning forests and flood disasters in the classroom “almost as if they were right in the middle of it.”

Textbook illustrations are routinely distorted to show catastrophic scenarios. Seydlitz Geographie 2, a geography textbook for secondary schools published by Westermann, is only one of many examples. It includes a temperature graph that supposedly shows average global temperatures over 12,000 years, with today’s temperature standing out by 0.4 degrees—despite uncertainty over whether current temperatures exceed those of 6,000 years ago. This fearmongering isn’t intended to teach science but rather to create compliant believers.

Worryingly, many other modern textbooks also reveal the extent to which education has been transformed into ideology. Cornelsen’s Focus on Success (2023 edition) for secondary school students learning English is a particularly egregious example of this. It even incorporates ideology into grammar exercises. Students learn sentence structures through lessons on global warming, the benefits of the EU (including arguments against Brexit), and diversity mandates. One exercise (p. 85) asks pupils to respond to the following fictional post: “I recently found out that my mum (who is transgender) is actually my dad.” Another exercise involves writing a blog post about living in a small community to which ten refugee families have just arrived. Pupils are asked to examine their feelings about the situation and their hopes for the future (p. 101).

This fundamentally corrupts the purpose of education. Rather than teaching children values and norms through literature and critical discussion, they are encouraged to focus on feelings and sensitivities. Schools have become vehicles for social engineering, relegating mathematics, literature and foreign languages—once educational cornerstones—to secondary status behind political messaging.

Parents fighting back

While most parents recognise this troubling shift, they are often still reluctant to address it. For a start, educational changes are often subtle and hard to pinpoint. Parents also worry that teachers and administrators who embrace these ideological programmes might view them as troublemakers or as being on the wrong side of the culture war, which could affect their children’s treatment.

The establishment exploits this parental vulnerability, knowing that few will risk their children’s academic future for principle. This creates a chilling effect, whereby those most affected—families—remain effectively silenced while ideological capture proceeds.

Yet successful resistance is possible. Ten years ago, parents in Baden-Württemberg mobilised against an extreme sex education programme intended to increase tolerance of sexual diversity. The new programme included questions for primary school children such as, “Is it possible that your heterosexuality is just a phase you will grow out of?” Despite being smeared as ‘backward homophobes’ by sections of the left press, the Worried Parents movement gathered over 200,000 signatures in a short time and forced government revisions.

More recently, parents in Berlin successfully challenged a mandatory mosque visit during Ramadan. One commentator complained that, while Christian festivals are ignored, pupils—including non-Muslims—are expected to take part in the Muslim breaking of the fast.

The Berlin Senate supported the parents, affirming schools’ duty of neutrality. This is an improvement on 2019, when a court in Schleswig-Holstein fined parents €50 for refusing a similar mosque trip.

These victories demonstrate that organised parental resistance can succeed. We can only hope that there will be more such protests. They are desperately needed to reverse decades of ideological corruption. German education has crossed the line from teaching to indoctrination far too often, substituting political compliance for intellectual development.

The stakes could not be higher. Post-war German education once represented intellectual rigour. Now, however, children are being taught to prioritise feelings over facts, ideology over enquiry, and political conformity over critical thinking. As the establishment faces democratic pressure from populism, it attempts to impose its ideas on schoolchildren in the hope that, by shaping the political outlook of the next generation, it can regain its grip on society.

This is something that not just parents, but many more who are concerned about education should resist. As the examples from Baden-Württemberg and Berlin demonstrate, only sustained, organised protest can force schools back to their fundamental mission of educating minds rather than engineering souls.

Original article:  europeanconservative.com