412 EMMANUEL DROIT AND WILFRIED RUDLOFF
suggested the adoption of a consecutive system for the degree programs,
this issue had been a persistent topic in the debate over university reform
in the Federal Republic. Since the task of reforming the system was put
into the hands of joint study reform commissions on the state and federal
levels, the foundation had been laid for a stronger involvement of the state
in the reform of university studies. The plan was to increase the effi ciency
of teaching, streamline and reduce the content of the degree programs,
and strengthen the praxis-related aspects of courses. The ultimate goal,
of course, was to deal with the transition of the university from an elite to
a mass institution.^83 Likewise, this new process was supposed to set the
course for a national standardization of study regulations at the diff erent
universities. Despite the major eff orts that were made, the results were
rather mediocre, so the commission was dissolved in the 1980s. Given
the continuing infl ux of students, however, the question of how to reduce
the number of semesters that students were taking to fi nish their degrees
remained on the agenda.
As systems of knowledge, both the East and West German educa-
tional institutions faced the question of how to deal with a whole series
of new technological and scientifi c challenges. They had to respond to
these overarching developments that aff ected both states with answers
that were specifi c to their respective systems. For example, discussions
over the place of environmental education and information technology
instruction in the classroom, as well as the changes that needed to be
made in curricula and instruction to accommodate them, had evolved
in both Germanys since the 1970s.^84 The socialist educational system in
the GDR was tasked with fostering “the development of a commitment
and sense of responsibility toward the environment and environmental
protection.”^85 In 1975, the Akademie der Pädagogischen Wissenschaften
(APW), which was an academy of pedagogical sciences, created a re-
search group for “environmental education in general schools.” Similarly,
“ecological” working groups were set up as part of a program in the late
1970s and the “environment” appeared as a topic in the book Vom Sinn
unseres Lebens (The meaning of our life) distributed by the SED regime.
However, there were still only mediocre attempts to include environmen-
tal education in curricula at the end of the 1980s.
In West Germany, on the other hand, environmental education had
made considerable inroads in school curricula in the 1980s. A joint rec-
ommendation issued by the cultural ministers of all of the federal states
in 1980 had called on schools to educate pupils to be environmentally
conscious. Topics such as “ecosystems” in biology, “the air” in chemis-
try, and “energy” in physics made up the core of the curricula elements
dealing with environmental problems in the mid-1980s. Environmental