EDUCATIONAL RIVALRIES 407
counteract the socially selective nature of the existing school system by
implementing the Gesamtschule model, only exacerbated the political
polarization that had set in. Likewise, these eff orts were met with con-
siderable resistance among parents. On the other side of the political
spectrum, the Christian Democrats distanced themselves from the idea
of “equal opportunity” in their cultural policy platform in 1976. Instead,
they spoke of their goal as Chancengerechtigkeit, which was a similar con-
cept, but one that emphasized fairness rather than equality. This switch
in terminology refl ected a programmatic shift in emphasis away from the
goal of reducing inequalities across the board to a stronger insistence on
properly addressing the diff erences in aptitude and talent among individ-
uals in schools.^52 The idea of “equal opportunity,” its critics suspected,
aimed to level out individual talents; in their eyes, the reform eff orts that
were being championed under this banner were actually part of an at-
tempt to misuse the schools in order to achieve a change in social order.^53
All in all, the expansion of education in West Germany up to the end
of the 1980s improved the chances for all social groups to send their
children to upper secondary schools, but there was still an imbalance in
the system and no major structural changes had been achieved. The per-
centage of students in the fi rst year of study among those of the same age
and respective social background climbed between 1969 and 1989 by 16
percent (to 43 percent) for the children of civil servants, by 9 percent (to
24 percent) for the children of salaried employees, and by just 2 percent
(to 5 percent) for the children of workers.^54 For the lower classes, the
redistribution of structures of opportunity was felt most in the Realschu-
len. At the university level, the Fachhochschulen (universities of applied
sciences) that were established at the beginning of the 1970s served as a
channel to move up the social ladder. Although inequality was lessened
to a certain extent, a variety of indications point to the fact that this trend
stagnated in the 1970s and 1980s.^55 Even more than the occupational
family background of an individual, it was the cultural capital of par-
ents—a family’s educational background—that retained its constitutive
signifi cance for the structures of social inequality governing access to
education.^56 Of the four dimensions of inequality related to educational
participation, namely social class, gender, religion, and region, it was
defi nitely social background that persisted most strongly.
Additionally, the educational chances for boys and girls had become
more equal, or even fl ipped in favor of girls, in both German states (albeit
in a diff erent time frame) as part of what might be termed a “silent revo-
lution” in education. At the beginning of the 1970s, girls were still under-
represented at the Gymnasium level in West Germany. But just a decade
later, they had taken the lead over the boys, accounting for 52.1 percent