alt Hacker Newsagreed. the whole system is bonkers and screams of elitism. like you are either born smart or you'll never make it. fortunately there is also gesamtschule. which does away with that, there is no distinction between levels. only your grades have to be good enough by grade 10 to make it into the oberstufe (yrs 11-13).
i barely made it through, and i would not have made it without that because neither my parents nor me had any ambitions, so switching schools would not have worked for me.
when i was younger we moved around a lot. different problem but same result, i didn't make any friends in school because we kept witching schools. by the time we stayed in one location it was already to late.
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>like you are either born smart or you'll never make it.
That is a bit dramatic. This topic has been talked about over and over. There is no perfect system. Treat everyone the same and high potential kids suffer. Split them up by ability and you get "unfairness" criticisms.
The other side of the coin is that you have ambitious kids in a class who are distracted and sometimes even bullied by kids with zero ambitions.
You think that's more fair to the ambitious kids when 2/3 of the class think it's cool to NOT learn anything and playing pecking order games all day?