Bernie Sanders: Isn't there a lesson here that we should be learning from Germany?

[Playinghardball]

Bernie Sanders @SenSanders · 2h 2 hours ago

Isn't there a lesson here that we should be learning from Germany? #Germany

[hifiguy]

1. State universities should be free or very low cost.

But there should be markers of progress for the sake of accountability. Somebody who is going to college free or at low cost should be making steady progress towards a degree and meet certain grade average standards or they should be booted out. I have no problem with private colleges continuing in existence. I've graduated from both public and private institutions and both have their advantages and disadvantages.

[LittleBlue]

3. +1

Well said. Yes, there has to be some sort of accountability. And though I hate it, there has to be some response to the market. It makes no sense to graduate 5 million nurses if only 1 million are needed, that would be wasteful. Right now some students make that decision by looking at tuition and debt from a cost-benefit perspective. Somehow we would have to incentivize certain outcomes so that we don't wind up with millions more graduates without job prospects. Hell, it's bad enough now.

[yeoman6987]

4. Sure if we only want the top of the academic

Ladder to go to upper level school. It would be as hard as getting into Harvard but for all schools.

[hifiguy]

5. Some people do NOT belong in college. Period.

The most egregious example I saw was a friend who came from a very well-to-do family who put forth a very small non-zero effort in most of his classes. I think he dropped out at some point with around a D average. He thought he was owed good grades whereas I worked my ass off for mine.

There would still be community colleges and trade schools, and people should be able to transfer to a state university after proving themselves in a community/junior college.

[Man from Pickens]

38. being realistic

There are relatively few jobs out there that actually require an additional four years of study. There are plenty of "skilled labor" jobs that really don't need anything more than a few months of training and a little bit of apprenticeship/real world experience.

Of the jobs that actually do require those extra years of study, there aren't anywhere near enough of them to fill the demand from the excessive number of college graduates we produce.

[yeoman6987]

39. We would have to completely change the way

Education is thought of here. I agree that too many go to college just because and the majors they choose are outrageous. But I agree with your post. I do not think it will work here though. It would be a test that Germany uses to see if you are college material. Americans hate testing. We have the SAT's that were supposed to weed out the non college prepared students, but we didn't like the test so a lot of schools are not even using it for admissions requirement. We would have a lot of work to do to facilitate this process.

[TBF]

26. Agree - although I would give folks a chance

to get through the first year or two - maybe 2.0 and then raise it a little higher as they get into their major.

My state school was less than $1000/semester but it was pretty tough competition once you got in. I started with lower grades in the big survey classes but was above 3.0 by senior year and 4.0 through grad school. I guess the other option for kids who struggled a little at first would be to cycle them out to community college and have a chance to re-apply when they bring up their grades.

That is one positive thing we can say about the US - at least here you have a chance if you have a bad semester. You're not marked for life if you get a C in a class - you can return and have the chance to do better (unlike some countries where your test scores can kick you out of the system pretty early).

[Dont call me Shirley]

2. Today post WWII Germany is a country the USA should seek to emulate. Democratic Socialism.

Instead the conservative powers are leading us into the pre-WWII and WWII behaviors of Germany.

[hifiguy]

6. I have been saying that for years.

Germany and the Scandinavian countries are the only possible models to use. Imperfect, of course, but sane and sustainable.

[Dont call me Shirley]

8. Sweden had been going down the "free market" koolaid path. But the Swedes are awakening.

As a side note, it's too bad that Jim Jones messed up the Koolaid name.

[hifiguy]

21. Modern Repukes studied Jones

except they intend to destroy everyone but their useful mindless minions. They want to do Jones one better and keep the willing slaves alive and believing in the delusion. Jones was a screeching, speed-addled paranoid. The 1% are calm, ruthless greed addicts.

[Dont call me Shirley]

40. The connection between the old food pyramid and religious cults, grain brain.

[Veilex]

22. "I have been saying that for years" - And you've been right for years!

[adirondacker]

7. A friend suggested we ended up with the right wingers immigrating into the U.S. from Europe.

It kind of makes sense. It's part of the reason the right wing Dutch settled South Africa. Too much Socialism in their Homeland.

[Dont call me Shirley]

9. Thom Hartmann calls them reich-wingers. Not far from the truth.

[Jackpine Radical]

16. I dunno about that.

My grandparents emigrated from Denmark and Germany in the late 19th & early 20th centuries. Both countries were practically feudal in those days.

[Fred Friendlier]

37. Both countries were transformed after WWII

and not a moment before.

Germany at the command of the victors, Denmark as a conscious decision to remake society for the benefit of everyone. For this reason I prefer the Danish model as to how we can fix our own country, although our habitual self mutilation on sectional and racial grounds drives me to despair over our chances for success in the near term.

[Enthusiast]

11. You are precisely fucking correct.

[DFW]

24. We do NOT have "Democratic Socialism" or any other kind of socialism here in Germany

We have a parliamentary democracy with a heavy dose of social consciousness blessed by the otherwise conservative Konrad Adenauer, who became DeGaulle's close friend after the war.

It has had its ups and downs, with the near Nazi-type repression of the news Magazine "Der Spiegel" in the 1960s. Franz-Josef Strauss, after whom the current airport in München is named, would have made Ronald Reagan seem like Bernie Sanders.

Today's Germany has its good and bad points. My cell phone is tapped because I have a high phone bill and call a lot of different countries. The health insurance system covers a lot more people than our system does, but by no means everyone. We stay here because my wife's mom is 87 and living alone, and I have painted myself into a corner with my job (made myself indispensable, but now can't find a replacement). If we were both free, we might stay, but we might just as easily move to Massachusetts.

[Enthusiast]

10. Germany learned not to spend everything on wars.

The United States has yet to learn that lesson.

Just sickening.

[Fred Sanders]

12. A lot of education could have be purchased without the trillion dollar F35 Flying Albatross.

Not just sickening, criminal.

[Uncle Joe]

13. Kicked and recommended.

Thanks for the thread, Playinghardball.

[rhett o rick]

14. Dear Sen Sanders, I wish it were up to us. We have literally zero influence on "our" government.

We live in an American Aristocratic oligarchy. Until we can reclaim our constitutionally controlled democratic republic, we are lost.

[quakerboy]

15. We've learned a few lessons from Germany

But they mainly have to do with controlling the message, not with advancing our citizens.

[tecelote]

17. OMG YES

[DrBulldog]

18. Germany - along with much of Europe - is becoming an advanced society ...

... and Americans are utterly delusional to think they are even close to being one, too.

[L0oniX]

19. Compared to Germany the USA is a Jerry Springer based country.

[daleanime]

20. K&R....

[BlueMTexpat]

23. Another thing that we could learn about education from Germany -

and other nations where it is practiced - is to have trade apprenticeships officially become part of the educational system.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apprenticeship and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apprenticeship#Germany

Also: http://www.euroapprenticeship.eu/en/germany1.html

Every functioning society needs skilled workers of every type. We simply need to value those workers as well. In the US, our comparatively limited offerings are generally at high-school level only. After that, private institutions - many with fraudulent credentials and claims - run rampant, if not literally amok.

While it may be true that not everyone needs a college education, those who wish to get one should never be denied from doing so because of monetary considerations. They should also not have to spend theirs lives paying back student loan debt.

If free tuition for college/apprenticeships cuts down substantially on prison populations, for instance, ALL of us are better off - and free tuition for all is much less expensive than subsidizing privately-run prisons, as taxpayers are already doing.

Bravo Germany!

[DFW]

25. The vocational training here in Germany is a very good program. There are very bad aspects, too

Teachers are government employees who cannot be fired. Some are nice and care about their students, but some are unfeeling arrogant tyrants who don't give a shit about their students, and NOTHING can be done about them. My elder daughter was so mobbed and humiliated by the system here that when she got a chance to study in the USA, she jumped at it, and has stayed there ever since. My younger daughter would have, too, but she graduated from her law school in 2010. That was right in the middle of Cheneybush's mini-depression, and the only job she was offered was by the Frankfurt branch of a British law firm. She loved living on the East Coast of the USA, but she wanted a job, too. She has since jumped to the Frankfurt branch of an American law firm because they are far less rigid, far more willing to listen to ideas of innovation, and pay better than her rigid British soon-to-be former employers.

German education has yet to figure out that innovative thinking and initiative are not detriments to learning, and the USA has yet to figure out that giving equal opportunity to everyone willing to learn, regardless of economic standing, means a lot more Americans with the skills to fill good-paying jobs, which means more taxes into public coffers.

We need to learn that universal financing of education is good for the country. Germany needs to learn that some faceless bureaucrat in a Ministry office does NOT know better than teachers and professors what students need, that student access to their teachers and professors is NOT a bad thing, and that lousy educators need to be fired and replaced instead of kept eternally by a system that suffers under them.

No one country has a monopoly on great ideas, and no one country has a monopoly on bad ones. Too bad that some international conference can't put into someone's head that taking the best aspects of each country is not a concession of authority or autonomy, but rather a concession to their respective populations.

[stevenleser]

27. Very well put. Should be its own OP.

[delete_bush]

34. Thanks!

My very limited understanding of the German vocational training program painted for me a rosier picture than what you've expressed. The inability to get rid of bad teachers coupled with a top heavy bureaucracy is a pox on both Germany and the US, is seems.

[DFW]

36. The old Prussian "Beamtenstaat" is still very much with us

Taking an idea from Napoléon, the Prussians filled their pre-WWI state with powerful "civil" servants that couldn't be fired. This is still the reason for France's economic woes. They have a top-heavy state apparatus with far more government workers than they need, and far too few taxpayers to support them.

The Germans who built up the Third Reich and its efficient state apparatus, including the Gehieme Staatspolizei (Gestapo) and, later on, the extermination camps, were all "Funktionäre," or functionaries, or, what we call civil servants. "The state can do no wrong, and we are the state."

The extermination camps are gone, and a healthy dose of civil consciousness, imposed on them by none other than the occupying powers, including us, turned their state apparatus into something far less fearsome, but just as formidable to navigate or fight if an injustice or indifference occurs.

Case in point: about 30 years ago, a guy in Düsseldorf opened an office where he received complaints from frustrated citizens about uncaring and obstructive civil servants ("Beamten&quot , and tried to help out the frustrated citizens with publicity and legal advice. He was actually forced by the authorities to close his office and cease his activities because "the state provided the ability of citizens to file protests through official channels." In Germany, there is a law on the books--I am not making this up--against "Beamtenbeleidigung," literally, insulting a civil servant. If a cops kicks your ass without justification, you can file a protest, but if you call him an oaf for doing it, you are committing a crime in Germany.

The progressive people who support and maintain the vast vocational training programs have not been able to rid themselves of an antiquated system so ingrained in their culture that it permeates all aspects of life here. The reason the East German Ministerium für Staatssicherheit ("Stasi&quot was able to be so pervasive is that the system for doing it was already in place. Franz-Josef Strauss tried to push it through in the West, but fell flat on his face (luckily!!) after the Spiegel Affäre. As it was, the Stasi ended up collecting so much information on its citizens, it never had the time or the personnel to evaluate the vast mountain of data it had.

Don't get me wrong, I do enjoy the positive aspects of life here, but I'm under no illusion of it being any kind of paradise on earth just because they are doing away with fees for university attendance.

In Germany, when you live somewhere, you are "polizeilich gemeldet," or "registered with the police" wherever you live. If you move, you have to tell the police you're moving, and where to, and when you get there, you have to tell the police in your new town that you're there, and where you just came from. How do you think THAT would go over in the States?

[ProfessorGAC]

28. Look At The Title of the Guy In The Quote

The minister of science and culture. We don't even have something like that. Politicians run the EPA, the CDC, FEMA, DOE, et al.

They've got a ministry devoted to culture and science. Something else to learn from Germany.

[ensemble]

29. The beauty of living in an exceptional nation...

is that we don't have anything to learn from any other country.
Education, health-care, military spending, green energy, social safety net.... we can't be bothered with what works in other countries.

[99Forever]

30. Our next President nails it again.

Bernie Sanders, of the People, FOR the people.

[rock]

31. You're not aware of the principle

that our politicians don't want the voters making rational choices? Thus no 'critical thinking', no real education. If the voters were educated all the Republicans and half the Democrats would be voted out next election. ( OK )

[Donald Ian Rankin]

32. The flip side is that free college education has the effect of taxing the poor to benefit the rich.

Even when it's free, children of rich parents are very disproportionately likely to get into good universities, so subsidising it is effectively redistributing wealth from poor to rich.

That's not necessarily an overwhelming argument against - "that's fine, we will resdistribute wealth from rich to poor more in other ways" is a perfectly valid response, and so is pointing out that lots of other desirable things that should probably be subsidised, like public libraries, are used by the rich more than the poor, and so is arguing that the indirect benefits of a more-educated populace help people other than those getting the education.

But I think that there's a strong case to be made that at least some of the cost of a university education should be born by the beneficiary - ideally through a graduate tax rather than through up-front fees, so as not to discourage poor students from apply ("either this will help you get rich, or you won't have to pay for it&quot .


(In the spirit of disclosure, I should note that my own university education was massively subsidised; I was in one of the last few generations in the UK to get in before tuition fees went up).

[whereisjustice]

33. we farm our young so the rich may dine on them. eom

[Tierra_y_Libertad]

35. Defense spending: Germany $48.8bn USA $640.0bn

Are safer than Germany? Better educated?

http://www.businessinsider.com/tuition-costs-by-country-college-higher-education-2012-6?op=1


Germany

Education costs: $933


USA

Education costs: $13,856*

*The USA has a range of higher education costs. Private education in the USA has average tuition costs of $24,700, while public costs $7,173.