IMPACT OF HIGH SCHOOL PREPARATION
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insisted. So I found an ordinary public school in Vienna. The boy did very
well.
It
was a public school nearby, where a prominent social-democratic
politician just had decided to pull out his child from that school and put
him in a parochial school because the standards in the school didn't seem
high enough for him. I don't want to draw too many conclusions from this
story, but you might understand why I like it.
GabrielleWeinberger: I'm an associate professor at a private college in North
Carolina. I teach both in the English and in the German departments. Part of
my education was in Europe, and part in the U.S. I teach the freshmen English
as
if
it were at the high school level, partially doing what you were suggesting.
But I don't think that fixes the problem. Teachers in Austria, to my knowl–
edge, all have a master's level education in the field they're teaching, which is
very important. As Rita Kramer said, the competency of the teacher in the
field he or she is teaching is crucial to our success. And I don't believe
transplanting some well-meaning college teachers will change our system.
Donald Keaney: I'd like to raise the issue of the racial questions involved
in this, of education, of multiculturalism. I don't think these questions can
be moved in a positive direction unless white people have a strong racial
conciousness as a means of defending their culture, their civilization. I also
wonder how this kind of abstract universalism that so many people believe
in is actually a belief system that facilitates and enables the particularisrns
of minorities. It actually doesn't work toward any benign universalism but
facilitates particularism, racial and ethnic conciousness.
Kurt Scholz: I think
if
we want to live together in one society we should
design a school system in which the art of living together is part of the sys–
tem. I would refuse to divide my school system into different contradicting
ones. My philosophy is to give as much assistance as possible to all the chil–
dren coming, mostly from Eastern Europe, into Austria. But their cultural
identity has to be preserved by cultural institutions, libraries, and so on. I
do not want to split up my school system into different, small, conflicting
school systems because I think this would endanger my main goal of
teaching the art of peacefully living together. I know that this is one point
of view and there are others, legitimate ones, too. But this is mine.
Donald Keaney: I think the Austrian situation sounds different. If
you're dealing mostly with immigrants who are from eastern Europe
you're dealing with much less heterogeneity, with people from a
Western European context. In the United States you're dealing with
people from different races, from other parts of the world, a much greater
