Why We Shouldn’t Say “Auf Wiedersehen” To German Class

Today,  I learned that my old high school is discontinuing higher German from its curriculum. This is precisely the opposite direction from where educational institutions should be going because German courses are already hard to find. I was 18 when I decided to study Higher German, which meant that even though my school did offer German up to  Higher level at this time, I had to go to the next borough to study because Fife College did not provide it. In my case, this led to a great partnership and friendship, so I can’t complain. However, German is a beautiful language and with approximately  95 to 100 million native German speakers in Europe, more students should be offered German as a part of the main curriculum.

In education, romance languages like French and Spanish tend to be more widely available than German, perhaps because of the stigma surrounding the difficulty of German grammar. The reduced demand for German that this misconception creates means that more and more institutions are simply not offering the language to students! As a passionate Germanist myself, I believe that German is one of the more straightforward European languages. Compared to French and Polish, which are both languages I have studied, German has more grammatical and lexical similarities to English. This means that if more students had immediate access to German classes, the stigma would soon break as more people discover how logical the German language is for the native English-speaking population.

Due to this lack of availability, students who wish to study German are often forced to attend an additional institution on top of their own school to pursue their academic interests.

 This presents inconveniences for both the German student and the educator. In my second year at Edinburgh College, the vast majority of my peers were high school students, and timetabling was an issue because they had to coordinate the lectures they attended at college with their free periods at school. Not only that, but the college lectures seldom fitted into one period, this meant that the students often had to miss the end of the lecture to get to their next class on time. Missing the end of lectures makes students susceptible to missing essential information and may harm their performance in the final exam.

 Although this issue also affects educators in additional institutions, they face other problems when taking on students from different institutions. Firstly, they are often in charge of more students than their romance language-teaching colleagues because institutions frequently only employ one German teacher along with multiple French and Spanish teachers. This means that one person is solely responsible for all the German students at every level, not only in their institution but also in other schools. This puts pressure on the German teacher because not only are they responsible for sometimes 50+ students but the fact that they host students from other schools can mean that they have to travel out with their place of employment in order to carry out speaking exams. The demanding nature of this is not very healthy for the teacher, and it can be hard to maintain a work-life balance. If the same amount of German teachers as romance language teachers were employed in every school, then the quality of work conditions for German teachers and the quality of education for German students would be improved.

In conclusion, I do enjoy following the language department of my old school on X. However, I am disappointed that they have made this decision because it narrows people’s choices in an already narrow market. The number of German classes in Scotland should be increasing instead of decreasing! I believe that if more people had access to the language, it would grow in popularity.

Eilidh Elizabeth Molly McGrath 💜