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The German bourgeois magazine Der Spiegel published yesterday following articles

Letter From Berlin
 
Germany's School of Hard Knocks

By Marc Young

Recent revelations about a violence-plagued high school in Berlin have Germans worried about the state of their country's education system, the decay of modern society and the poor integration of foreigners. But are things really that bad and are Germany's immigrants to blame?

Anyone who's spent time in Berlin knows what a safe city it is. Sure, there's petty crime and occasional violence like in any big city, but compared to London or even the new cleaned-up, Disneyfied version of New York City, Germany's capital is a very peaceful place to live. That is, unless you happen to be teacher at the Rütli high school in Berlin's scruffy Neukölln neighborhood.

Last week, a letter from the school's faculty describing a complete breakdown of discipline and growing tendency towards violence by the students was made public. The situation had gotten so bad that some teachers refused to enter their classrooms without a mobile phone they could use to call for help if they were threatened. One Rütli teacher even told SPIEGEL that he often dreamed one of the out of control teens would "finally burn the place down" so he wouldn't have to face another day working there.

So what's life like at a Berlin school where 83 percent of the student body has a non-German background? The faculty letter describes an institution that appears to fail both its students and the teachers working there: "We must realize that the mood in some classes currently is marked by aggressiveness, disrespect, and ignorance towards adults ... The tendency toward violence against property is growing ... In most of the families of our students, they are the only ones getting up in the morning. For them, school is a stage and battleground for attention. The worst culprits become role models."

The letter created an immediate uproar across the country. How could this happen? The ensuing frenzy by the German media made the Rütli school sound like it could rival the worst inner-city schools in the United States. Police and metal detectors at the doors was the answer offered by a few pundits. Some politicians pointed to the extremely high percentage of students from immigrant families. Was it not evidence of Germany's failure to integrate foreigners and a warning against further immigration?

But the calls for prison-like security and the xenophobia-tinged scapegoating of foreigners completely miss the mark. If anything, the whole episode is more an indictment of an antiquated German school system that shunts students off into different academic tracks early on, as well as the country's inability to make many immigrants feel they are valued part of German society.

Neukölln is not South Central LA

To be sure, by German standards Neukölln might be a rough and tumble place. The Berlin district does struggle with widespread joblessness and a fair chunk of its non-German inhabitants are indeed marginalized from the rest of society. But the neighborhood and its schools certainly can't compare with downtown Detroit. No one is getting shot on a daily basis -- not at Rütli and not in the neighborhood -- and there is nothing of the kind of gang violence found in South Central Los Angeles.

The kids at the Rütli are without a doubt disrespectful, destructive and uncivilized. But such uncouth youths are a problem wherever apathetic and disengaged parents fail to care for their children. It would therefore be easy to chalk up the "scandal" about the school simply as another example of Germans talking down their own country. It's in fashion these days to complain about the decay of Germany's economy and society. Whether it's the country's chronically high unemployment, the inability to compete in a globalized world, or simply the poor state of German soccer, moaning and Cassandra-like panic has become something of a national pastime. But dismissing this as Teutonic malaise would be wrong for several reasons.

While not as bad as they are made out to be, Germany shouldn't wait until things get worse before it tackles the problems exposed by the Rütli school affair. If anything, this should serve as incentive for a long-overdue revamp of the German school system. Currently, high schools are broadly separated into three tracks: Gymnasium for university-bound students, Realschule for the less academically inclined, and Hauptschule -- vocational schools like Rütli -- that all too often end up being receptacles for problem kids from troubled homes. Germans have unfortunately long clung to this inflexible system which needlessly segregates children early on and frequently determines a person's later station in life. In Berlin, the children from many immigrant families are predictably more likely end up at a Hauptschule than Gymnasium.

A socio-economic problem

And that leads to the next point: Although poor integration certainly doesn't help matters, the horror stories emanating from the Rütli school have less to do with immigration than with basic socio-economic problems. It wouldn't be hard to find a young black man born and raised in Detroit who feels just as marginalized in American society as a young Arab or Turk in Neukölln does in Germany. And there are most certainly a number of schools in economically depressed eastern Germany filled with just as many troubled German kids from failed households.

The outgoing principal at the Rütli school, Brigitte Pick, recognized that in a letter published on Monday in the Berlin daily newspaper Der Tagesspiegel. "The actual problem doesn't stem from the Arabic, Turkish or Serbian background of the students, but rather the lack of opportunities for them," she wrote. "The Hauptschule is only chosen by marginalized groups without a future and from students expelled from elsewhere."

Cem Özdemir, a Turkish-German member of the European Parliament, pointed out in a SPIEGEL ONLINE commentary last week that this has, in effect, exacerbated efforts to integrate foreigners into German society, since the children of immigrants and the children of middle-class Germans have very little contact with each other in the country's school system.

Of course, when parents no longer teach their children how to behave as civilized human beings, it makes it very difficult for teachers to do their job no matter how committed they are as educators. But this is a universal lament in nearly every modern society. Unless young men and women feel that they have both a stake in their society and a shot at a decent future in it, there is little a shocked and outraged nation can do to convince them otherwise.

More about this issue maybe later, when I got a workplace, computer with internet... Right now I am just writing in PC bang..

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France's Lost Generation
 
The Faces Behind the Protests

By Francois Krug in Paris

Behind the scenes of mass protest in France are high school students who fear a dismal future, university students who see their opportunities shrinking and McJobbers who are struggling to make ends meet as they are pushed from one company to the next.

These days, Paris's Latin Quarter looks more like Baghdad's Green Zone than the traditional home of France's thinkers and writers. The neighborhood has become a no-go zone. The streets surrounding the Sorbonne University are empty and blocked with steel barricades. Students and teachers have given way to policemen in riot gear who stand ready to repel assaults with water cannons and tear gas.

The Sorbonne has long been a reminder of the power of youth protests in the country since the May 1968 upheaval that shook the government of then-president Charles de Gaulle to its core. More than three decades later, it has again become a lightning rod for social upheaval. On March 10, more than 200 students occupied the Sorbonne to protest labor reforms recently pushed through parliament by Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin. The government promptly sent in the riot police to drive the rebellious students out. Officials had won the battle, but the Sorbonne protests sparked a nationwide political war that pitted university and high school students fearful for their future prospects against the government. The protest turned into a national revolt that quickly created disruptions at more than 80 of the country's universities and hundreds of high schools. This Tuesday, the country experienced its second general strike in seven days. 

When Villepin announced in March he would loosen French labor laws to make it easier to hire and fire young workers, disillusioned youth erupted in anger -- evoking memories of 1968 and last autumn's riots in the banlieue suburbs of Paris. To curb the staggering youth unemployment rate, which rose to 22 percent in March, Villepin created the "contrat première embauche," or first-time employment contract. Previously, it had been extraordinarily difficult for French firms to fire employees who had been with a company six months or longer, but CPE allows workers 26 or under to be fired without notice or reason within their first two years on the job. Villepin had hoped the new legislation would give employers greater incentives to hire young people. 

For a few weeks, the government staunchly defended CPE, but as the protests mounted, President Chirac intervened on Friday, announcing he would sign the law, but he order changes to be made to its most controversial clauses. The probationary period would be reduced to one year and employers would need to state a reason for firing workers.

Chirac's reassurances, however, have done little to assuage French youth. The Sorbonne has now been closed for three weeks, and all of its students are gone but one.

The lone counter-protester

Alexandre Duclos sits on a camping chair right outside the sealed-off Sorbonne Square. For a week now, the 23-year-old philosophy student, who is working to obtain his doctorate, has been holding a hunger strike in an attempt to reopen the university here on the sidewalk. "France has become a police state," he says in a weary voice. "This government is deaf and blind. Look at what they did in the suburbs (during the November riots) and what's happening now. Their only answer to people's sufferings is to send in the army. This country is sick."

Duclos has turned his abstract philosophy into reality by starting a protest of his own. But once the student movement is over, he will be forced to confront harsher realities -- on the job market. "I haven't thought about it yet," he admits. "Actually, I don't care." Asked about his dream job, he hesitates. "I guess I'd like to be a street philosopher," he finally answers, without any trace of irony.

As it turns out, Duclos has found an unintentional job as a tour guide.

An Italian woman stops by. She is disappointed by the neighborhood's tranquility. "Nothing's happening here, where should I go?," she asks him. "What are you looking for?" he asks. "Students, protests, action!" Duclos directs her to nearby Censier University.

The occupied campus

Further south in the Latin Quarter, student protesters still control Censier University. They have been enforcing their own rules on the campus for five weeks now and access is barred to strangers. Courses have been cancelled and replaced with political debates, documentary film screenings and plays. Every other day, students vote on whether to continue the strike and the occupation of the university.

This may look at first like a reenactment of the glory days of 1968. But there's a marked difference: the '68ers' had dreams, but today's students only have fears. "We don't want a revolution, we want jobs," explains Mathilde, a 21-year-old Italian studies major. "Baby-boomers could choose their jobs and keep them for life." Truth be told, their parents did have it easier: In 1968, only 6 percent of French university graduates were still jobless after finishing school. That rate has since swollen to a discouraging 29 percent. And for the first time since the end of World War II, young workers are earning less than their parents did at the same age.

"We're supposed to build the future, but our generation is being sacrificed," says Romain, a 21-year-old communications student who, like many others at Censier, declines to give his last name. "I'm speaking as part of a collective movement, not as an individual."

For many French students, giving up job protections that have long served as the cornerstone of French labor policy is unthinkable. "With CPE, the government is blackmailing us," says Nadège, a 20-year-old media and cinema studies student. "What they're saying is: If you want a job, you have to accept  the fact that you may be fired at any time without complaining." Nadège works part-time in a warehouse, wrapping DVD boxes, and she has a better sense of the job market than most of her friends at the university. "I'm ready to accept reforms, but not this one," she explains. "But when you protest against reform in this country, the government describes you as a conservative. Our generation isn't conservative or revolutionary. We simply refuse to be singled out like this. This is a social protest, not a cultural revolution."

The high school students

The CPE legislation has also outraged high school students, who have served as an important part of the anti-CPE protest movement. The high school arm is being led by the Union Nationale Lycéenne (UNL), the country's national high school student union.

UNL's tiny office looks like a student's bedroom -- empty soda cans, paper packaging from fast food and piles of leaflets and newspapers are strewn about all over the desks and floor. But the office, hidden in a rundown building in the Pigalle neighborhood far north of the Latin Quarter, also serves as the control room of the high school protest movement

"Sorry for the mess," Floréale Mangin says, apologizing to visitors. "We've had a pretty busy day." Early in the morning, UNL members were arrested while blockading Paris's city freeway. In the afternoon, others invaded a train station and stopped traffic for two hours. And Mangin, one of the union's leaders, is now getting ready for a night of meetings and phone calls to prepare for the next wave of demonstrations.

At 17, she has already mastered the French rules of protest. Rule No. 1, she says, is to use any means necessary to put pressure on the government -- including disrupting the lives of normal people with traffic jams and train delays. "Making noise is the only way to get heard," Mangin explains in a soft-toned voice. Rule No. 2: When the government seems ready to bend, demand even more. Mangin remains unmoved by Chirac's plan to water down the CPE: "We won't negotiate until they fully back down."

Mangin is part of a new generation of protesters. Unlike the 1968 revolutionaries, these rebels are highly pragmatic. "We're not the children of the '68ers,'" she says, "Our movement is different. We are dealing with education and unemployment -- real issues, not ideals. This is a social protest, not a cultural revolution."

But there is more to this than the usual social protest. It is also a political war between generations. Young high school and college students are challenging politicians who are older than their parents and sometimes old enough to be their grandparents. Chirac is 73 and 85 percent of the representatives at the Assemblée Nationale are over 45.

"They don't live in the same world as we do, how can they decide what is good for us and build our future against our will?" Mangin asks. As a teenager, she has already honed her political skills, but she is not a full citizen yet. She will first be eligible to vote in 2007, just in time for crucial presidential and general elections.

20 and unemployed

Eugène Simsek is taking a cigarette break outside the local office of the government's job agency in the working-class neighborhood of Clignancourt, on the northern outskirts of Paris. The 20-year-old unemployed worker has just printed out the latest job postings and is giving them a careful read. "Restaurants, only restaurants," he mumbles. "I'm tired of restaurants!"

The documents in Simsek's hands would infuriate student protesters. They are proposals for jobs that adhere to an earlier version of CPE that was created for small businesses last year without much protest. Economists are still doubtful that the reforms will have much of an impact on the economy. Major employers are worried about the current uproar and most haven't adopted the controversial contracts yet. But if Simsek's case is any indication, Villepin may be right -- at least in certain respects. The new legislation could help Simsek to find a new job.

And the fact that it wouldn't give Simsek any job security doesn't seem to bother him. Since he left school two years ago, Simsek has gotten by with a handful of McJobs -- working as a bartender, a waiter and as a call-center operator. Last year, he finally signed an unlimited-length contract and became a salesman for a window-making company. His employer had hired him under the contract because of generous tax incentives, but it then turned around and laid him off on the last week of his three-month probationary period. Simsek has been jobless for two months now.

Villepin's legislation is expected to provide a boost to people like Simsek, who have limited education and experience and remain hopelessly unemployed. Unfortunately, as the government and the media focus their attention on the university students, people like Simsek remain the unheard voices of the French revolt. For them, unsteady jobs are not a threat. They are already a reality.

"Villepin's contract is unfair," he says, "But it's no worse than the other ones. I'm ready to sign it. I can't refuse proposals. Right now, I have no hope of getting a steady job." 

Perhaps the current situation in France for former students is not so different from the situation in S. Korea....