406 EMMANUEL DROIT AND WILFRIED RUDLOFF
The East German school system in fact produced social diff erence: the
POS was socially mixed, but it was primarily supposed to be for working
class children; the EOS, on the other hand, largely remained in the hands
of a political, economic, and academic elite, who were the “inheritors of
education”^48 or the children of university graduates and members of the
civil service class—in short, those who were the bearers of legitimate
culture. The EOS became the stronghold of the socialist intelligentsia and
civil service. By performing very well at school and mastering the ex-
pected socialist habitus (i.e., the internationalization of behaviors, lan-
guage, judgment, and Weltanschauung, as well as commitment in youth
organizations), children from these families were able to gain access to
university education. The “bourgeois monopoly on education” had there-
fore been replaced by the “socialist privileges of education.”^49 The most
important criteria for being admitted to the EOS were academic perfor-
mance and loyalty to the system. The children of civil servants profi ted
the most from the growing importance of these criteria. Despite the offi -
cial discourse about equal educational opportunities, “equal opportunity”
was no longer the regime’s fi rst priority. This reality clashed with the
expectations of most families, especially since they were almost always
told that the East German schools fostered upward social mobility. On the
one hand, an increasing number of teenagers successfully completed the
ten grades at the POS, yet the doors of the EOS kept closing in the face
of the children of production workers at a higher rate. Thus, contrary to
offi cial propaganda, social reproduction processes came to play more of
a role. The GDR hardly diff ered in this respect to other Western European
countries such as West Germany or France, where the republican schools
also rested on the “myth of equal opportunity” just as in East Germany.^50
In West Germany, too, the politics of equal opportunity lost some of
its shine in the mid-1970s. The main reason behind this shift was the
realization that social background still continued to play a decisive role
in educational opportunities, despite the expansion of the educational
system. Interpretations that claimed that schools did little to change ex-
isting patterns of inequality (such as those put forth by James Coleman,
Christopher Jencks, Pierre Bourdieu and Jean-Claude Passeron, etc.) be-
gan to set the tone within international debates over education.^51 This
shift from optimism to skepticism about reforms in educational policy did
not fail to reverberate in West Germany as well. The political fronts be-
tween the parties had hardened since about 1973, making it more and
more diffi cult to push through educational reforms that addressed social
policy matters in the complicated negotiation processes that surrounded
educational policy like a tight net. Attempts made by social-liberal state
governments—especially those in Hesse or North Rhine Westphalia—to