IMPACT OF HIGH SCHOOL PREPARATION
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Emigration to Austria and integration in Vienna. The question of
integration is essentially linked to Viennese and Austrian history. Around
1900, Vienna was the melting pot par excellence. But unlike New York
and other American cities, in Vienna the various immigrant groups were
really "melted" together and did not remain separate pieces of a mosaic.
Vienna profited immensely from this integration but the negative side
should not go unmentioned.
Emigration and integration always cause opposition-and the situation
in Vienna was by no means different. The Aryan super-being as an oppos–
ing model to the "cosmopolitan racial mixture" is the darker side of
Vienna's history. It started as an aggressive prejudice and ended in the
Holocaust. But after the second World War, waves of immigrants have also
swept into Austria. The Hungarian refugees in 1956, the victims of the
Prague Spring in 1968, the large and very discreet migrational movement
of Jewish emigrants from Russia and Eastern Europe moving to the free
world via Austria, the Polish refugees, the thousands of migrant workers
from Turkey and former Yugoslavia, and the most dramatic changes in
Eastern Europe, the fall of the Iron Curtain and the war in former
Yugoslavia caused waves of immigrants to come to Vienna. The number of
foreign students in Vienna's elementary schools has risen from 7 percent
or 8 percent to as much as 36 percent. This is far higher than in other
European cities. Nevertheless, the Viennese school organizations solved the
problem quietly and efficiently. There were perhaps sounds of whining and
wailing in the political arena but not within the school systems.
What were the reasons for this? First, and most importantly, in Vienna,
the teacher-pupil ratio is 1:8, so there is one teacher for every eight pupils,
statistically. This sets a European record. Of course, this figure does not
truly reflect the reality of a school class in Vienna, where there are approx–
imately twenty to twenty-four pupils. But our system is generous, allowing
for a two-teacher system. If necessary, one teacher can personally take care
of five, three, two, and sometimes even only one pupil (according to per–
sonal preference or plan during or outside normal class time). In working
with handicapped children, the two-teacher teaching system is normal
(and often there is a third teacher with special training, such as a speech
therapist, and so on). Vienna never had special classes for foreign pupils; our
philosophy was not to segregate, and even during the war in the former
Yugoslavia when the pupils' relatives were fighting against each other there
was never any violence among the different ethnic groups in our school
classes. Children are international, more so than grown-ups. In my opin–
ion, the greatest contribution of our school system to the society is of
other than a "pure pedagogic" nature: it contributes enormously to the
internal stability of our country, to the peaceful relationship between different
