EDUCATIONAL RIVALRIES 425
In the 1970s, both German educational systems came to a turning
point, albeit in diff erent ways. Educational policy in both states lost much
of its character as an instrument of social reform. If we consider that the
East had sought to provide a superior school model by “breaking the
monopoly on education” of the middle classes, this change in character
was even more true for the GDR than for West Germany. Education was
seen as less and less of a lever for regulating social changes, and less
and less as a space for the dissemination and redistribution of social op-
portunity. Rather than focusing on privileging the “children of workers
and farmers,” the GDR moved toward the self-recruitment of a socialist
intelligentsia. While educational participation continued to increase in
West Germany, the brakes were put on educational expansion in the GDR
(as measured by the chances of completing an Abitur and going on to a
university). In this respect, East Germany deviated from the general inter-
national trend. A diff erent logic also governed the steering mechanisms
in both systems. In the East, educational opportunities for individuals
were subordinated to the economic planning calculations within the em-
ployment system. In West Germany, by contrast, the social demand for
education took priority over any predictions about labor demands, and
the coordination of the employment and educational systems was sup-
posed to be left up to the compensation and adjustment processes of the
job market. Until its collapse, though, the GDR did stay in the lead when
it came to women’s education.
Moreover, changing economic and demographic frameworks shifted
the basic coordinates of educational policy. Education lost ground to so-
cial policy on the political policy agendas in both German states.^139 Over
time, education also lost a considerable amount of signifi cance as a form
of demarcation between the systems. The successes of the expansive
GDR education policies in the 1960s that were seen as a leap in modern-
ization were no longer a barb in the side of the West German system be-
cause it had begun to catch up with the expansion of its own educational
system. West Germans proponents of the comprehensive school system,
however, were still better off politically if they refrained from making
references to the ideologically contaminated Einheitschule model in the
GDR and opted to point out the merits of the numerous other integrated
school systems that had been established in the West. In education, the
1980s were generally marked by a “phase of immobility and cooling off ”
on both sides of the Wall, which diff ered from the ongoing modernization
eff orts that could be found in a number of Anglo-Saxon states as well as
countries in Northern and Western Europe.^140
The educational rivalry between East and West came to an end in 1989
with the peaceful revolution in the GDR. The East German educational