Wasting money teaching English?

[Torsten]

Although or maybe because Germany is still a rich country the unemployment rate especially in the Eastern part remains high. That's why some Germans are moving to the UK or Ireland to find jobs there. I've just returned from York and London where I worked for a company that organizes work placements for German people. Both the companies providing the work placements as well as the Germans working in those companies are benefiting from this programme.
Now, based on our experiences it is vital to understand that if you want to go to the UK you need good communication skills. This doesn't mean that you have to speak perfect English. Most of the participants of our programme have been taught English for years. Please mind the wording: They have been taught. This is a passive construction because it reflects pretty much how the German education or the German society works: For every single step in your life there is an institution, an authority or organization that tells you what to do. Unemployed people are put into so called training courses which means they sit with 15 to 20 other 'students' in one room for 8 hours a day from Monday through Friday watching or listening to a teacher who is desperately trying to teach them English. Think about it: If you are forced to 'learn' English for 8 hours a day along with 15 other Germans you will very soon lose all your motivation. I have visited a learning centre in York which is based on a highly effective system that saves the city millions of pounds a year. Most of our so called education institutions waste millions of Euros a year. Why am I writing this? Because I know we have to change something and I want to share experiences with English language trainers, business people, students and anyone who might have an opinion on the subject.
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[Kievstar]

Stealing money? Here is how I see it: When you have a job the state collects a part of your salary and puts it into some kind of trust fund. Then, when you are made redundant the state can offer you a training program that is funded by the money they collected while you had a job. What is wrong with this system? Who is stealing money from whom?

[katarzyna]

I think you are right, Torsten. What’s more there are more and more such institutions wasting money, not only government ones but also private.
I was in business for more than 15 years and what I can say is that the motivation of a student is essential. The school I was working for had very good percentage of students passing successfully different exams (nearly 100%). They paid for the courses, they needed certificates for job, and they simply had the motivation. I think most of them simply loved English.

But sometimes what is given for free is not appreciated at all.
Any examples from my school? Some unemployed people were sent to my school for FREE English courses. I negotiated max. 6-student groups though the employment agency wanted them to be min. 16. I offered lower prices thinking that this way I can help people in need. Shortly after the course started, there were only half of registered students present on the lessons, some were regularly late and some appeared in the classroom at the end of the lesson just have ‘present’ in the register. As I was paid for it, I felt uncomfortable with the situation so I called the local employment agency so that we could do anything with the situation. To my surprise, they were not interested in the matter. One of the women told me that her responsibility was to REGISTER people for a course, not TO CHECK them.
I wanted to work out some rules students must follow taking benefits from attending free courses so I got in touch with people in charge. I think that that was only a problem for them so next year they .... chose another school. For the whole year nobody came to check our job. They wasted a lot of public and EU money, they wasted also my time.
Yes, teaching people who have no motivation is like trying to teach a parrot to speak. And maybe the latter is easier .
I often ask myself if it wouldn’t be better to organize a fund for those who have no money but WANT to learn.
In situation you described to us, the motivation of the students exists. They want to communicate even if they are not keen on learning languages. Forcing anyone to learn a foreign language only because someone in charge thinks it maybe helpful ‘in general’ is stupid.
I think there are much more institutions which ‘know better’ what is good for people.

[Torsten]

Kataryzna,

It's quite interesting to learn that Poland seems to have a system in place that is similar to ours. As Kievstar said, the government collects a part of an employee's salary to use that money for further education courses. The idea itself might be good, the question is how effective is the entire operation? You have described what happens if somebody is offered a training course they haven't chosen and paid for themselves. So why not give the employee the freedom to decide what type of futher education they need? Once a person can learn and read they are also capable of making a choice when it comes to their further education.
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[Jamie (K)]

Torsten, in any system where the government or an institution seeks out people to give an education to -- as opposed to the people seeking the institution out -- you're going to get some people who do nothing. They will remain unmotivated even if disaster is looming. They will sit on the tracks with the headlight of a speeding locomotive shining straight in their faces. Some people just don't think more than a day or two ahead, and others have undeservedly inflated egos and resent having to upgrade their skills.

When car plants in the US need to lay off workers, they usually tell them a couple years in advance and pay for their retraining for a new profession. One man at a Buick plant told a newspaper I once helped with that, "They pay for the education, they bring the professors into the factory, they do everything but sit in the desk for you, and there are still guys who won't take the deal."

I think maybe the main problem in Germany, and in Europe in general, is excessive socialism making people lazy and risk-averse. People think they have the "right" to a certain affluent (by world standards) material level, and they play a game of "chicken" with the government to see who gives in first (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Game_of_chicken). And the government usually gives in and still supports their lifestyle somehow. Here in the US, in neighborhoods where people are close to the edge and have less social assistance (now), you see a lot of motivation in people. In a neighborhood I frequently drive through, I see a man on the hottest days pedaling an ancient Good Humor (Algida) tricycle he's fixed up and selling ice cream, snow cones and Mexican snacks. I'll bet next year he'll have sold or given the tricycle to some other man, because he'll have some bigger business. Little shops pop up from nothing, there are all kinds of things going on that I never saw happen in Europe, except for during the early days after communism fell in the Slavic countries. In fact, I don't think people even CAN do that over there, because they would need to pay thousands of euros for a business license, more money to join the chamber of commerce, etc. Anyway, I think most of these people would be quite motivated if they couldn't fall into "the social hammock", as you Germans call it, and if there were fewer restrictions on entrepreneurship. A lot of them wouldn't even bother going into a government program, because they'd be too busy.

I think that in Germany there also must be some other factor at play to cause the people's lack of motivation. In my private and public lessons, I find that Germans are the only students who get a clear look of horror and self-hatred when they make a normal mistake. Not all of them are like this, but I'd say 25% to 33% of them are. Even in a friendly atmosphere, you can't get some of the private students to touch a book or an exercise, because that would mean having to make a mistake, and the whole idea scares them. They will do anything to avoid it, which usually means turning even a three-hour lesson into a gab session so that they won't have to worry about goofing up in front of anyone. After a mistake you can see the horror and humiliation on their faces so clearly that I can just imagine a group of Germans sitting in class for eight hours a day and not participating just because they don't want to take the risk of making an error.

Maybe I'm wrong about all of this, and you can tell me if I am or not.

[Torsten]

Hi Jamie,

You pretty much hit the nail on the head - many people in Germany have gotten used to high living standard and they often use their creativity to find excuses why they are not moving forward. I couldn't help but smile when I was reading your examples of the entrepreneur in the neighourhood you often drive through. Yes, I agree that in Germany we still have a lot of 'socialism', that is, people exept from the government and its many instituations to take decisions for them. For example, when it comes to education, it's a rare case that a German would consider investing money and time into training courses while they happily spend their dollars (or rather Euros) on holiday trips, cars, mobile phones and other items.
You have brought up another issue - the fact that Germans are afraid of making mistakes and therefore avoid trying out new things. I think this is true and it also explains why many Germans don't want to take any risks. For example, when a German loses their job they basically have three options: they can receive social benefits, they can try finding a new job or they can become self-employed. The vast majority would never consider the option of becoming their own boss because they think this is too risky. Now, when you really analyze it you will see that is much better to try and offer your own services than to rely on the state owned labour agency to find a job for you. East Germany has been facing a very high unemployment rate ever since reunification and that is primarily because East Germans are used to receiving orders from the government rather than moving on their own initiative. After reunification they learned how to use their new freedom: they now are complaining more or less openly about the government, the bureaucracy, etc. instead of seizing the many opportunities that are available to them.
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[Jamie (K)]

[Torsten]

Hi Jamie,

Again I agree with what you are saying about many Germans trying to look for reasons why something can't work rather than concentrating on the advantages of a situation. I recently have worked with a group of research engineers who where on a 3 month outplacement program. Their professional qualifications are probably way above average but they have to change their perspective. Most of them simply refused to accept that it will be very difficult if not impossible to find a new job with the same salary and benefits in the same town. (it's an East German city of about 30.000 inhabitants). The company they had worked for the past 10 years is now bankrupt and there might an investor who will purchase it. However, it's very unklikely that the new owner employs the same staff because they have contributed to the disaster of their company but not wanting to adapt to new circumstances. Still, most of the engineers would wait 3 months until a new investor might be found instead of starting a new career. They often told me that it simply impossible for them to move to another city because they all own houses and have family. Interestingly enough the majority of them has grown up children who work and live several hundred kilometers from their partents and seem to be happy with that situation.
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[Jamie (K)]

This kind of inertia of disbelief must be a universal human trait. My brother's plant was bought out a few years ago by a similar company who said they did not plan to keep the old staff. (They kept my brother and one or two others for an extra half year to do special projects on a contract basis.) The thing that amazed my brother the most was how many of his coworkers seemed to believe that someone or something would just come out of nowhere to rescue them. After all, they deserved it. Some of them were foolish enough to spend all their severance pay on fun and luxuries before having any idea how long they would be unemployed. They treated it like lotto money. As I said, many people don't think very far into the future.

A company based where I live had a problem when they bought a bankrupt Czech company. They explained their usual modus operandi to the employees: "We are the last company that will buy you. If you do not bring the company to profitability, we will make our profit by liquidating the company and selling the physical assets. You either get with the program or everyone loses their jobs." How much more clearly can you put it? They wound up with the big problem that most of management believed it, but most of the blue-collar workers just sat around thinking they were guaranteed a job forever.

Back to the problem of wasting money educating such people, I'd have to say that a lot of the problem is people's egos. They have an attitude that says, "I know my job! I don't need to learn anything now!" You can hear it from them if you sit around the unemployment office for a while. One man once complained to me that his daughter, a nurse's aide, was being cheated, because she was making much less money than a nurse, "even though she knows more than all the nurses!" I told him that the only way to fix the problem was to get two more years of education and become a nurse. She could get some "free money" to do that. "What's the point?!" he roared, "She already knows more than the nurses!" But she doesn't have the same education and certifications. It didn't matter. All rational argument was lost on this guy.

When I was in college I had a coworker from a ghetto family who had worked in very low-paying jobs that barely allowed her to support her three out-of-wedlock children. At lunch time and during the breaks, she would read very difficult novels by authors like Thomas Hardy, and she'd discuss them with me. This was very unusual in her social circle. I told her, "You're so smart that you should go get some free money and get a college education." Instead of being flattered, she got angry. Finally, though, she went through a vocational secretarial school, which gave her the polish and discipline to get through university, and then she got a much better job than I had. She came back to the factory to visit, and I told her, "See?! I told you you could do something with those brains of yours!" Even then she just sneered at me.

A lot of organizations here that help the poor have come to realize that there are efficient and inefficient ways to do it. People who are so deep into their social pathologies that they don't want help can't be helped. The most efficient way of bettering society is to give a boost to the people who have already realized that something has to change. The rest just have to stew in their own juices until they figure out something is wrong. It's sad but true. Nonetheless, we can't stop trying.