At Berlin’s Herbert Hoover High School, roughly 90% of the pupils come from immigrant families, but in a step that has caused political ripples they have been told to speak German and nothing else.
”German is the language spoken in our school. Every pupil is therefore obliged to communicate only in German,” reads the rule that was adopted at the school in the working-class neighbourhood of Wedding.
The deputy headmaster, Hans-Joachim Schriefer, said it was implemented with the consent of representatives of the parents and pupils and has been ”well accepted”.
”We took this step after we realised that there was a constant increase in the number of pupils of non-German origin, who were speaking about a dozen different languages, notably Turkish,” he explained. ”The aim is to ensure that the pupils can understand each other and to help them improve their marks.”
The move has won the backing of the power-sharing government of conservative Chancellor Angela Merkel, but it has unsurprisingly upset Berlin’s sizeable Turkish community.
A Turkish MP from the opposition Greens, Ozcan Mutlu, has argued that the rule contravenes the German Constitution, which says that nobody may be discriminated against because of the language they speak.
The students themselves have mixed feelings about the new rule.
”If we want to have a chance to get a trainee job, we really need to speak German,” said Assad, a 17-year-old pupil from Pakistan.
Lydia, a 13-year-old of Turkish origin whose mother tongue is the Semitic dialect Aramaic, said she can understand being made to speak German in class, but not during break time.
”It is a bit much to expect us to speak German in the school yard,” she said, adding that she has been told off by teachers for not sticking to the rule.
”When we see that a pupil does not speak German, we call them in and ask them to do so, please, but there is no punishment,” Schriefer said.
The German-only rule was introduced a year ago, but a recent article about the school in the Turkish newspaper Hurriyet stirred up the old debate in Germany about using language as a means to force the country’s 4,7-million immigrants to integrate.
The State Secretary for Integration in the chancellery, Maria Boehmer, has not only spoken out in support of the language rule at Herbert Hoover High School, but expressed the hope that other schools will follow suit.
”Children should be given every opportunity to become full members of society and this means that they should master the German language,” Boehmer said on Wednesday.
Wolfgang Thierse, the deputy speaker of the Bundestag, the Lower House of Parliament, has also voiced support for the rule and called for it to be implemented at all schools to ”show that we are serious about integration”.
Germans began asking anew whether integration was working late last year when riots erupted in Paris’s immigrant-packed suburbs, sparking fears that the same could happen here.
The language issue remains a big part of that debate, and at least one other school in Berlin, in the district of Kreuzberg, which has one of the city’s highest concentrations of Turks, has also started forcing pupils to speak German only.
But the local authorities in other major German cities with high numbers of immigrants, including Frankfurt, Cologne, Hamburg and Munich, have said they would not consider banning other languages from the school grounds. — AFP
