These broad statements seem ridiculous to me. If you're speaking from personal experience, you should at least add which subject you studied and at which Uni/FH you studied.
But the German education system isn't like Anglo (e.g., US) systems. 27% of this generation of Germans have post-secondary education, compared to 43% of their American counterparts.
Someone explained to me that this is due to Germany's focus on trades and apprenticeship.
> Someone explained to me that this is due to Germany's focus on trades and apprenticeship.
Yeah, the Berufsschulen (vocational schools) mirror the university system with 5+ year trainings that net apprentice/master certifications; and a master is in many trades necessary to be allowed to work as freelancer/found your own company – even for blue collar jobs like plumber, painter or car mechanic.
This has started to erode in the past two decades, though, because all those jobs are being automated and/or outsourced and people try to rush to the universities.
Edit: Apparently, (partially in reaction to this) a Meisterbrief now is considered to be equivalent to a Bachelor of Arts degree.
It's funny, because some Americans grumble about the lack of focus on vocational training and trades, while OP was grumbling about the lack of breadth and liberal education in Germany.
> while OP was grumbling about the lack of breadth and liberal education in Germany.
Yeah, I've no idea where that's supposed to come from. The only area where I'd consider the education to be narrow is at universities – and there it's by design, because after 13 years of breadth-first education in the Gymnasium (mandatory three languages, music, sports, arts, chemistry, philosophy/theology, physics, maths, political education, history, computer science, …) you should be able to pick a specialization without turning into a drooling retard.
Well, I don't know anything about Gymnasium, but it doesn't sound very different from K-12 compulsory education in California. Except the many languages and computer science-- children learn to program in Germany? That's amazing.
I don't think the average high school-educated American is a drooling retard (contrary to popular belief...), but the onerous General Education requirements of bachelor's degrees provide additional breadth of knowledge.
Learning multiple languages is a necessity in Europe, it's handled similarly in the surrounding countries.
> and computer science-- children learn to program in Germany?
The basic courses don't get further than Excel macros, but in the extended courses it's fairly solid (data structures, algorithms, multithreading even back before multi core CPUs were a thing, …).
> but the onerous General Education requirements of bachelor's degrees provide additional breadth of knowledge.
That seems to be the difference, then. Our bachelor degrees are already limited to domain-specific knowledge; you're supposed to do several degrees if you want to further broaden your horizon (arguably not entirely unreasonable if it's free).
Computer science education seems to vary a lot between high schools. It basically depends on how good your teacher is. (Each state also has an official curriculum.)
