feuervogel | (Reply)

We'd love to come visit you in Germany! I also love Berlin, although I admit I love Muchen better.

Re: schooling -- I met a German ex-pat here at a dinner party and she said that the bad thing about totally state funded schooling is that you basically decide at age 14 what you want to be when you grow up, and what your major in college is. It's really hard to switch, and once you finish your degree, you can't just "go back to school" the way so many people do here in the US, because the places in school are for the younger folks. You can't even pay your way to get in, the way anyone with a degree can take full-price classes at San Jose state here.

For the people who choose/are pressured into hoch schule? abiture? the trade-school route, there are so few apprenticeships actually available, that the prospect of a high-paying job is basically denied to them for life AND the decisions on who goes where were frequently racially motivated. It was the most negative assessment of the German school system I'd ever heard, I hope it's not that bad in actuality.

The woman in question after completing her degree decided that what she'd really rather be is a post-partum doula. She and her husband decided to move to the US where she could actually go back to school and study to follow her passion. (He was in software or engineering or something similar and it was easy enough for him to move here.)

I don't know how amenable the Germans are in reality to allowing foreigners buy their way into their school system.

--Beth