EDUCATIONAL RIVALRIES 399
the expansion of the educational system was not primarily the result of
any political steering eff orts, but rather it emerged to a large extent from
a self-propelling social process that fed on rising educational aspirations
among parents and pupils.
In the GDR, the situation was reversed in many respects. Political steer-
ing measures had a comparatively stronger infl uence on the trajectory of
educational participation in East Germany: at fi rst, the aim of these pol-
icies was expansion, but then the goal became to put the brakes on this
process. The decision to introduce the polytechnic high school with ten
grade levels as the standard school was made at a time when not even a
ninth year of Hauptschule had been instituted in all of the West German
states. Although this shift to the polytechnic high schools was not without
its hiccups, 90 percent of pupils had attended both the ninth and tenth
grades at the POS as of the 1980s.^15 For a time, the GDR also seemed to
be pulling ahead of the Federal Republic in the expansion of university
education. The quota of school graduates with an Abitur was 15 percent
in 1965, which was twice as high as in West Germany. It must be noted,
though, that there were more alternative ways to complete an Abitur in
East Germany, especially in the form of the dual diploma combining vo-
cational education and an Abitur at the same time.^16 But, this was by
no means a phenomenon that was limited to the two German states: in
general (with a few individual exceptions, of course), the number of stu-
dents rose more strongly in the states to the east of the Iron Curtain in
the 1960s than to the west. As of 1960, the ratio of students was above
the average of the West European states in most of the communist bloc
countries.^17 The East seemed to have taken over the lead in what might
be termed the educational rivalry between the systems.
But then, after the transition from Ulbricht to Honecker, the expan-
sion of the educational system suddenly came to a halt in the GDR. An
abrupt stop was put on the rising student quota in 1971, and then the
quota was pushed back down; it then stabilized at about 12 to 14 percent.
The optimism of educational economists in the Ulbricht era, which was
based on the assumption that the demand for academic qualifi cations
would continue to grow, had dissipated by the 1970s. The link between
the output of the education system and the demand for highly qualifi ed
labor forces seemed to be splitting apart.^18 Ulbricht had announced at the
Ninth Congress of the Central Committee in October 1968 that the GDR
needed to become the global leader in terms of scientifi c-technical cad-
res by 1975.^19 But then Margot Honecker, as education minister, declared
that instead of preparing pupils to study at universities and technical col-
leges, the main purpose of schooling was to provide new generations of
highly qualifi ed skilled workers.^20 From this point on, the socially induced