BERLIN - There's nothing new about companies taking part in youth training, always looking to avoid a shortage of qualified workers in their sector. But lately, more and more top corporations are actually financing schools themselves.
Three years ago, Volkswagen financed a school for the city of Wolfsburg in northern Germany; the Klett publishing group finances several schools – among which the Swiss International School in Stuttgart – and day care centers; and TÜV Rheinland has paid for a number of schools in the former East Germany.
For corporations, creating public utility foundations offers tax advantages, and corporate social responsibility initiatives also look good in the Annual Report.
But that corporate money should be used to actually fund schools is a rare thing in Germany – although it’s a rising trend.
Bettina Würth doesn’t like to talk about her school days. She started school in the late 1960s, and what disturbed her was “the feeling of powerlessness in relation to the teachers.” Her own children grew up in very different times, and yet Würth was still dissatisfied by what the state school system was offering.
Many parents feel that way. But very few have a company worth billions to back them up, in this case the Würth Group which describes itself as “world market leader in its core business, the trade in assembly and fastening material” -- everything from screws to tools and personal protection equipment.
Bettina Würth is the granddaughter of the company’s founder. In 2006 she opened a school at the group’s headquarters in Künzelsau (Baden-Württemberg), and she has just inaugurated a second school in Berlin, also called the Freie Schule Anne-Sophie. Both are financed by the Würth Foundation to the tune of 10 million euros per annum for the running expenses alone.
In the Würth Group Annual Report, the schools are listed under corporate social responsibility along with items such as the art collection of Würth’s father Reinhold. Bettina Würth says she gave financing very little thought, and that the compensation money she got following the accidental death of her eldest daughter Anne-Sophie – after whom the schools are named – is what gave her the impetus to open the first institution.
Würth says that what is most important to her is that in her schools, no child is overlooked -- "particularly children who are not average, so that they get individual attention.”
To turn this goal into a reality, Würth turned to Swiss educational innovator Peter Fratton. The educational concept of the school (“house of learning”) is based on “autonomous forms of learning,” and -- as a visit to the school in Zehlendorf, in Berlin showed -- there are a number of other differences with other institutions. For one thing, teachers are not called teachers but “learning facilitators,” and the students are “learning partners.” Classes are “input phases,” after which the learning partners are off to do some autonomous learning in workshops where secondary-level partners have their own workstations and iPads.
There are 15 learning facilitators for 111 partners. Some of the facilitators are English natives, who teach the children in German and English. There is also a lab and a "cyber classroom" with a 3D-TV system for use in natural sciences. Würth invested over 1.5 million euros for furnishing and equipment for the Berlin school alone. "Here, we’ve done what state schools can’t offer."
Pricing system
However, her schools are not free. While there are scholarships for children of parents with no income, parents earning even as little as 10,000 euros a year are expected to pay 100 euros a month, in addition to the registration fee of 750 euros. Parents with an income over 180,000 euros pay just under 1,000 euros a month.
Despite having to pay fees, an increasing number of German parents see private schools as preferable to state schools. In the last 20 years, the number of private schools has gone up by 60%. Presently, one out of 12 children are receiving a general education at an independently operated school. The reasons for this are as wide-ranging as the types of schools on offer, from religious schools (still the majority of private schools), to Waldorf and Montessori schools through to posh boarding schools.
That some companies are now creating their own schools worries critics. They fear that students could be influenced by the business world or even that companies could inculcate their company culture through the school.
As regards her own establishments, Bettina Würth considers these concerns absurd. They are not “company training grounds,” she says; in fact, the only ties are a few projects for which the students can volunteer -- and having some people from the company explain the principle of capital interest. What’s important, says Würth, is not who the backers are but that the children be healthy, self-aware and competent individuals.
That’s a goal that public institutions would also claim. Their means are, however, more limited. For years, Germany has been investing markedly less (based on the size of its economy) than many other OECD countries in education. Going hand-in-hand with that is an increase in official praise for private educational initiatives. The latest edition of the government’s Poverty and Wealth Report explicitly mentions the "sustainable fostering of strategic corporate engagement."
Professor Michael Hartmann of Darmstadt’s Technical University, whose field is the sociology of elites, sees such statements as a distortion of reality. He is not questioning the good intentions of Bettina Würth or other backers, but the problem, he says, is that this sort of action "creates the impression that something noteworthy is being done, but it’s really like a drop of water on a hot stone" – because although the involvement of the corporate world and its foundations in the educational system may be media fodder, that changes nothing at all in the school day of the vast majority of young people.
In addition, says Hartmann, the trend could take the edge off the urgency of the debate on education policy, and end up slowing down necessary reforms. When the focus of the more affluent classes switches to private schooling, whoever the backers, politicians feel less pressure to get something done in the public schools.
