In three decades as a U.S. Foreign Service Officer, I served twice in Germany. First, from 1976 to 1981, I was Commercial Attache in Bonn and Cologne. Later, 1988-90, as the USSR collapsed and the Berlin wall came down, I was posted to Ramstein Air Force Base near Kaiserslautern. There I was Political Advisor (POLAD) to the Commander-in-Chief, U.S. Air Forces Europe (CINCUSAFE). During both assignments I learned much about  German education and about education of American dependents in U.S. Department of Defense dependent schools. 
      
By 1988-90 our older son had finished college. Our younger was doing a university year in Munich.  Both sons visited Berlin to gouge souvenirs from its rapidly disappearing wall. My memory, however, returns especially to the five years in Bonn. Our family had very positive experiences with the three different German schools which our young sons attended 1976-1981. In this column I will give some of the flavor of German education about God and religion. This lays the foundation for what I will say in a later column about selecting and applying German ideas to American schooling. 

Our younger son began in grade two of our neighborhood elementary school (“Grundschule”). Traditionally, all young Germans rich or poor begin such neighborhood schools together.  Education is a state (“Land”) subject in the Federal Republic of Germany and there are variations among the states. In North Rhine-Westphalia (where Bonn is situated), elementary school lasts four years. Religious instruction (Catholic or Lutheran, with content approved by church authorities) is offered in each grade, whether the school is secular or faith-based. After finishing Grundschule our boy was admitted to Nikolaus Cusanus Gymnasium, the secondary school most adapted to non-German children in Bonn. 

We had arrived in Bonn in October 1976, a few weeks after school began. Our older son had, however, studied in a German school in Baghdad, Iraq. He was permitted to begin fifth grade (first year of Gymnasium) only upon my promising to give him a crash introduction to Latin to catch him up to his schoolmates. Our boy then spent five great years in that Gymnasium. There he learned all the formal English grammar he would ever learn. 

In North Rhine-Westphalia, the Gymnasium (a kind of liberal arts prep school covered grades 5 through 13. A Gymnasium is designed to produce future lawyers, historians, judges, civil servants, mathematicians and the like. Upon graduation, the student goes straight to a university and immediately specializes, e.g., in medicine, law, theology, philosophy. By the end of Gymnasium general education roughly equivalent to that of  American two-year or even four-year colleges, has been completed. Typically, the student is also well trained in two or more foreign languages. In German primary and secondary schools parents are strong co-active participants in the
learning process. Gymnasium students spend three to four hours daily on homework and parents are expected to stay close to their children, mentoring and reviewing written work.  

Parents may also become advisors to the faculty in certain academic areas in which they have special competence. Thus my wife Mary, who has a Ph.D. in German and Linguistics, joined three other parents as advisors on the teaching of English. I was selected for a similar role as the sole parent advisor in philosophy. That is right: PHILOSOPHY in secondary school! 

In North Rhine-Westphalia Gymnasia students were allowed to select one major and one minor subject during their final two years (grades 12 and 13) for intensive study and research. These might include theology (all German schools public or private need highly trained teachers of religion), mathematics, physics, English, Greek, German and, yes, philosophy. Representing all parents of the Heinrich Hertz Gymnasium, I sat in on the final oral examinations in philosophy of students aged 16 to 19. I asked them questions. Students were first given a number of written questions, six or seven as I recall, and an hour or so to rough out for oral discussion answers to any three which they chose. It was a delight to hear these young men and women tackling knowledgeably problems such as truth telling, euthanasia or the existence and nature of God from the points of view of Aristotle,
Augustine, Kant or Kierkegaard. 

At a similar age I had attended grades 7 through 12 of St. John Berchman’s School in Shreveport, Louisiana. There I was taught by Jesuit priests, future Jesuit priests and lay men and women. I received a solid education in languages, physical sciences, history, literature, debating and elements of the Catholic faith. But I did not study philosophy. 

In the United States, students are taught religion and may legally pray as an integral part of education only in private and religious schools. Our national constitution defends each person’s right to the free exercise of religion but prohibits all layers of government from taking acts which flow from or look like an establishment of religion. Increasingly, however, public school teachers who care to, supported by parents who insist on it, do teach ABOUT God, religion, Judaism, Shintoism and so on without ADVOCATING or ATTACKING religious faith. (See my September 25, 1997 Asheville TRIBUNE column, “Religion in North Carolina History.”) 

Through this column, using Germany as an example, I have laid a basis for a follow-on column. There I make the case for teaching students in American public high schools about God in the way philosophers find God. In that “secular” philosophical way some students will come to know important truths about God . Admittedly, for knowing God intimately, philosophy does not come close either to theology or active religious faith. But, in America's secularized government schools, teachers are not allowed to help their students build personal relations with God or draw upon the riches of God’s revelation in Jesus Christ. But even public school students can learn of God through reason drawing upon experience. What they learn is  little compared to the riches of the book of Job, the Psalms or the Gospel of John. But that little is true, precious and can be, I will argue, “secular enough” to pass constitutional muster in American public schools. More anon. 

-000- 

for Asheville TRIBUNE