Anyone working and living in Luxembourg for a tiny bit understands fairly quickly there’s a damn big problem with its education system.
Grade repetition is rocket high, upper secondary graduation levels are low for a developed country, while comparative standardized tests are among the worst in the developed world – especially so for students with a migrant background, which poses major equity concerns. At the same time, the school system in Luxembourg is BY FAR, but like by really – really – really far, THE most expensive school system in the developed world, thus in the entire world (more about this later).
And when it’s time for us, parents, to send off our little precious ones to school, we feel scared and powerless.
Scared because we know our kids can only struggle having to learn up to three different foreign languages in childhood. First, Luxembourgish in kindergarten, then German in primary school quickly followed by French, which is supposed to be the main language of instruction as of secondary school. The more a household’s languages differ from those three languages (take a Polish and Spanish couple for instance), the more difficult for a kid to integrate the system.
But most importantly, what scares us real is the low quality of education provided in Luxembourg schools. Don’t get me wrong: trilingualism, or indeed multilingualism, isn’t a bad thing per se, it’s a wonderful thing in fact! But because all three languages must be taught to all children enrolled…. well…. they end up learning mostly languages, at the expense of pretty much everything else (we’ll come back to this at length).
How wonderful is this for kids to swallow pages of vocabulary, lists of past tenses and tables of irregular verbs along their entire childhood? In the longer run, how much pro-activity, assertiveness, creativity or analytical mind does it help develop? This blog argues that, if most education systems are ill-prepared for the challenges of the future, the Luxembourg one is alarmingly archaic in that respect.
Lastly, as parents we feel powerless because of the total lack of accountability of the system. Teachers benefit lifelong tenure with their work barely ever reviewed, never challenged. Although the system is extremely centralized, schools are not evaluated (or they are somewhat: but the results are kept locked in a safe for no one to see), let alone compared. Headteachers can be wonderful ones (yes, there are some in Luxembourg too!), or total cretins… who cares, their school results are neither published, nor used for any purpose of quality improvement. This total lack of accountability comes to a shock when ones starts envisioning the level of cash, or public money, that is poured into school infrastructures and teachers.
Enough to say here that there is a lot to denounce in Luxembourg’s school system. This blog aims at doing just that.
SOS Education Luxembourg 