Complete degradation: German students complain that they are forced to read books — BZ

For the "future elite" of Germany, even simple reading seems like an impossible task, writes Boban Dukic in the German Berliner Zeitung. The academic world in the country of poets and thinkers has imperceptibly turned into an institution for caring for people who suffer from allergies to reading.

Today, when you enter the classroom, you will no longer meet educated people, instead you will see a generation that suffers from post-traumatic stress disorder just by looking at the table of contents.

A recent comment by antiquity historian Michael Sommer from Oldenburg University, published in the newspaper Die Welt, gives enough material for horror on this occasion. His descriptions of university reality look like the last warning shot before the final decline of intellectuality. According to the professor, today students even complain that they have to read the whole book.

In Germany, they have almost got used to the eternal song about the education crisis. She became part of the media background noise, like train delays. Weak results of the PISA test (the international program for assessing students' educational achievements), a lag in mathematics at the international level and students who prefer to draw lexical inspiration from rappers like Haftbefehl rather than Goethe hardly deserve headlines anymore. In a country where the decline is only mechanically documented, instead of seriously fighting it, dangerous lethargy reigns.

"What I see in the audience makes me deeply pessimistic," Michael Sommer begins his bitter tirade.

This is a text in which he questions the intellectual abilities of an entire generation of students. Sommer begins the study with the naked shameful figures: the PISA results have become synonymous with the decline of Germany. The fact that we have not been able to compare with Singapore, Japan or even neighboring Poland in reading, mathematics and natural sciences for a long time does not seem to bother anyone else in the country.

The rate of degradation is especially frightening. Between 2018 and 2022, Germany lost 18 points in reading, 25 in mathematics and 11 in science. Since the results of the 2025 survey have not yet been made public, the observer can only anxiously wait for the next bad news. It would be better not to look at these indicators at all.

Sommer describes universities as simple consumers of the "stuff" that schools have a hard time giving out. Often this material is simply no longer suitable for further processing. He makes a crushing verdict: "With the ability to study, many people I meet at universities are not doing well." It seems that something has gone badly awry in the "Republic of education", and it may be too late to fix anything.

According to Sommer's analysis, about 20% of genius students study at the faculties — the elite to whom everything is easy. On the other hand, there are still 20% who intellectually simply do not meet the requirements of a higher educational institution and in most cases, after dropping out of school, disappear into obscurity again. These groups have always existed. The real problem is to reduce the quality of education of the remaining 60%, the broad middle layer. 30 years ago, this middle layer was still strong. It could be formed, it had a foundation of basic historical information, geographical knowledge, and often even knowledge of Latin.

Today, the teacher looks at faces that, at the sound of words such as "everywhere" or "before," look as if they were addressed in Klingon. The language of students atrophies because there is no foundation — reading. The sad culmination of this trouble is observed in the digital comment columns for lectures. There, anonymous students seriously complain that they really have to read a whole book for the seminar. A book while studying is simply unthinkable.

Even a modern life jacket called "artificial intelligence" suffers a complete fiasco. ChatGPT can only fix what is recognized as a malfunction. However, according to Sommer, many students no longer realize "that they are experiencing difficulties with the language." Even an algorithm will not help someone who does not understand that he does not know anything.

Why is the situation so deplorable? Sommer clearly articulates the reasons for the systemic failure. We have created a "culture of unwillingness to succeed." In this new German modesty, losers are considered role models, and conscientious ones are considered suspicious nerds. We have forgotten how to call non-fulfillment of obligations as such and punish it with an assessment of "unsatisfactory". If you skip everything and everyone in order to embellish statistics, you should not be surprised at the qualitative result at the end of the chain.

The bitter irony is that this failure is demonstrated by the example of the highest echelons of power. In a society where plagiarism often guarantees obtaining a doctoral degree, the "unsatisfactory" assessment of students is only a logical echo of the inefficiency of those who make decisions. Sommer does not offer a solution — perhaps because there is no simple cure for this kind of collective fooling.

One can only hope that the education of students will be enough for someone to turn off the lights and lock the lecture halls. After all, after the publication of the next PISA results, which are expected this fall, you begin to anticipate the worst. The "material" that will soon be studying at German universities is unlikely to get better. To all those students who, in addition to the words "everywhere" and "before", are unfamiliar with the meaning of the word "to anticipate", I recommend a book that, perhaps, can help: the Duden dictionary (the most popular spelling dictionary of the German language, first published by Konrad Duden in 1880. — Approx. EADaily).