51° 4/2010: Individual tuition
Being a country of immigration, Germany boasts growing cultural diversity. At the same time, flexibility and creativity are increasingly required in a highly complex society. To ensure that these challenges can also be met in the future, our educational system must evolve and advance. It must make successful educational careers possible, giving everyone the individual tuition they need and accompanying them from nursery school through to graduation from school or higher education. This is the only way to give all children and young people equal access and opportunities to develop, and in so doing to put in place an important prerequisite for greater participation and fairness. We have thus decided to devote this issue of 51° to the topic of individual tuition.
We see greater individual tuition as part and parcel of a fundamental reform of the education system. In this sense, it places great demands on every individual and on the system as a whole. It is important for nobody concerned – students, teachers, parents – to be left behind. Our projects tackle various different aspects in order to achieve more individual tuition by following a systemic approach. This ranges from providing language tuition to students of migrant origin to testing new full-day school models and implementing initiatives to improve the quality of teaching and degree courses at higher education institutes. Our aim is for individual tuition to help us achieve our targets, establish a new culture of teaching and learning in the educational system and eliminate the inequality in terms of school and university qualifications which currently exists between those with and those without a migrant background.
North Rhine-Westphalia education minister Sylvia Löhrmann will be talking about the significance of individual tuition. Frank Meetz and Christian Kuhlmann reveal how our project Ganz In will be able to bring about more individual tuition. Christel Kaufmann-Hocker and Heimo Richter take a look back at initial experiences of the Mercator Fellowship for International Affairs, which promotes highly-qualified university graduates. In addition, we report on the launch of the Chance² programme which for the first time accompanies young people of migrant origin and from non-academic families from sixth form to bachelor’s degree level, and on the discussion of educational deprivation and heterogeneity as opportunity that took place in the most recent Mercator educational discourse.