EDUCATIONAL RIVALRIES 405
West Germany. Whereas the issue of inequality was still virtually absent
from educational discourse in the 1950s, this topic became one of the
major points of discussion in education policy debates over the course of
the 1960s. The search for “untapped talent reserves,” whose exploitation
became a maxim not only of economic reason but also social justice,
heightened public awareness for the striking inequalities within the ed-
ucational system that ran along social, regional, gender, and religious
lines. The worst aspect, at least in the minds of the public, seemed to
be the social discrimination that accompanied educational diff erences.
The percentage of workers’ children among those attending Gymnasium,
for example, had hardly changed for the better between the end of the
Weimar Republic and the early 1960s.^46 As indicated by the micro census
data from 1972, the percentage of pupils over fi fteen years old attend-
ing Gymnasium from civil service families was 18 percent, although they
only accounted for 7 percent of the total population of the same age (the
children of salaried employees made up 35 percent and 19 percent, re-
spectively). The children of skilled workers comprised 23 percent of the
population in their age groups, but only 12 percent of Gymnasium attend-
ees; the percentage of the children of unskilled workers within this age
group was about the same, but they made up only 6 percent of Gymnasium
pupils.^47 Many of the plans for reform or restructuring that dominated the
debates over this period were justifi ed on the basis that they would correct
these social imbalances. Some of these ideas included more fl exible rules
of admission within the three tiers of the secondary school system, the
increase in the support available to fi nance a university education, and the
introduction of the Gesamtschule model of an integrated comprehensive
school (which was the subject of a highly controversial debate on the re-
form of the school structures). Educational policy was regarded as an in-
strument that could be used to change the social structures of opportunity.
Meanwhile, the educational system in the GDR came to function less
and less as a channel of social mobility and more and more as a machine
of diff erentiated sociopolitical reproduction and positioning. In contrast to
the earlier educational off ensive in the GDR, whose primary aim had been
to cultivate a new socialist intelligentsia, the new goal as of the 1970s was
to train and educate a broad-based, well-qualifi ed working class employed
in production, and a small but politically reliable class of elites. The educa-
tional system in the GDR determined the social position that would be ac-
corded to young people upon achievement of a certain level of education.
For the country’s decision-makers, there was no dissonance between indi-
vidual needs and skills on the one hand and the socioeconomic necessities
of the planned economy on the other. Young people were thus reduced to
“social entities” whose sole purpose was to serve society.