Abitur

And he encouraged her to, well, go and get more education.

So the first thing she had to do was get the Abitur, like get a high school degree, right? And she did that as an external.

And the sources differ.

It was either 1925 or 1926, doesn't matter.

and she was not making money

was she working for money outside the home at the time

I don't think at the time while she was studying for the Abitur, for the high school degree.

Yeah.

you the German example.

In Germany, when you want to do the so-called Abitur, which is the degree that you need to then go to university, to even get there, you need to prove that you have five years in a second language, which the region where we're living now is French.

If you don't know that because some schools abroad don't offer French, you are in big trouble because what are you going to do? If you are not careful that your child has that, you won't be allowed to ever even attempt the abattoir.

You're not even getting there.

That's almost sometimes easier than the step before, which is you're 16. and you want to go home and step back into your home country system for two years.

That's where often the ask is really tough, and families just need to be realistic.

You know, are we going to educate our child all over the world and then have them do British A-levels at age 16? Is that realistic? Or, you know, study all over the world and come back and do the French baccalaureate? Or, you know, in some, like Germany, if you want to be in gymnasium and do the Abitur, you know, that tracking starts at about, well, you would know better than I, maybe age 11.

So that was once again a rambling answer, but it's a matter of planning ahead before you go outbound on assignment and making sure you understand your own country system well enough.

quite a while actually had a totally different curriculum to England, a different system of exams.

Now, PISA is really useful because it's not it's not getting people to, you know, you're not trying to compare GCSEs with international baccalaureate or whatever or, you you know, Abitur or whatever they have in Germany.

It's like a test of skills in reading, primarily in reading, maths and science.

And what we find is English pupils are, 15-year-old pupils are really well-educated compared to basically anyone else in Europe.

But I think this should be now almost the same because we also now have bachelor system, bachelor and master.

So when you do your Abitur, you're usually like 17 or 18.

Okay.

And then we used to have, like me, because I'm old, I had to go to either the military or do the civil service for a year.

And like, yeah, it's our tradition.

Like we have been doing that for now 15 holidays where it's our Abifahrt, which is like after like the final exam after like 12 years of school, which is called Abitur here in Germany for short or Abitur for long.

you do like a trip where you usually travel to a very cheap place where you get very drunk.

And when we actually had our Abitur, we didn't quite want... to go that cheap and that drunk, me and my group of friends.

And so we kind of did our own trip to a little bit nicer place because we traveled to the south of France.

And we still drank quite a lot, but... with a little bit more restraint maybe and like that developed into a tradition and yeah we have now been doing that for 14 years or 15 trips so it's also just always a like really really great time like the core of the group stayed the same by now we also have like partners who like came into and we actually have children by now who are part of it.

That would be great, right?

I think I would do an Abitur again or something like that.

I would go to school again.

No.

These are experiments on our schools.

They would restrict the students who get the Abitur to 25%.

They argue that this reflects the number in academic secondary schools.

But in Saxony-Anhalt, there are many ways of getting the Abitur, and way more than 25% of kids get it.

The AfD would cap that.

That's why I say no experiments in our schools.