Our own experiences of political lessons in NRW

In this blog post I’m going to discuss what political lessons at schools in NRW are really like and what the students think about them…

First of all, it differs from school to school how many political lessons we have had in our career at school. Speaking for myself, I only had political lessons in the 8th grade and in the 13th grade when it was obligatory to attend a course which was called social sciences which is similar to politics. But I know a lot of other cases in which students had political lessons through their whole school career. That’s why I think that my school was an exceptional case but it’s rather unusual to teach political stuff only two years. To make it more understandable, especially for our American student colleagues, I have to say a few words about the role of politics at German schools:

From grades 5 to 10 politics is a minor subject which means that we do not have to write exams in that subject. Most times the teacher talks with students about different problems which have more or less to do with politics. From grade 11 it changes completely. Students are allowed to choose it as a main subject in which they write exams and in grade 12 they can even choose it as an advanced or intensive course. If you do not choose it in grade 11 then you have to do an obligatory political course in grade 13 as I did.

I know that now you are tired of theory, so I will tell you something about the content of political lessons in NRW which will be certainly more interesting for you.

In most schools political lessons are divided into three parts:

1. Politics



2. Economy



3. Society or Social Sciences

In the 8th grade our emphasis lay on economy related to industrialization. I learned the way of the cocoa bone to chocolate. Therefore my class visited the chocolate museum in Cologne. This was a very interesting teaching series!!!

Jenny, who is part of our group, told me that from grade 5 to 10 her teachers focused on the financial management and the stock market, the voting system in Germany and the USA, which is of course very useful for our course, and social inequality. Here you can see the three parts I have mentioned above.

From grade 11 to 13 the main topic was social sciences in which we talked about people who come from different cultures but live together in one society. A typical example is the high number of German-Turkish people, who for example were born in Germany but whose parents come from Turkey. We discussed it very detailed in class because we had lots of students with a Turkish origin at school. According to that topic we analyzed the social structure of Germany’s society. How many people or percent of people are rich/poor, well-educated/uneducated and so on in Germany?

What we have to criticize are the following points which have never been topics in OUR political lessons at school:

1. Different forms of government, e.g. democracy, anarchy, dictatorship




2. What is the business of the Bundestag, Bundesrat and Bundesgerichtshof?




3. In political lessons we rarely talked about the judicial, executive and legislative branch! We only did it in history lessons!

All in all, you may see that in fact we did a lot in our political lessons at schools in NRW but we, as students, are not pleased with the content of the lessons. In retrospect we think that the teachers should have taught more important things like forms of government which exist in the world and the business of our chancellor, our president, the Bundestag and so on because that’s the reason why a lot of young people in Germany don’t know much about our political system and the business of the single parts of the government.

We think that political lessons at schools should be improved!!!

PS: I found an interesting German article about a project relating to political lessons at schools…

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