Thoughts About the Gymnasium Uberlingen Exchange — Part I

We recently completed the 19th exchange between our school and Gymnasium Uberlingen from southwest Germany.  In my time at North Fayette Valley I have been part of five exchanges, and this year was my first as a participant that traveled to Baden-Wittenburg, and the community of Uberlingen on the shores of the Bodensee, or Lake Constance.  It was an incredible experience, and I actually started to write this article on one of the “off days” we had early in our visit.  I was quite reflective that day, and already blown away by the experience up to that point.  Now that I am back in West Union, I have had more time to reflect on the experience and the exchange.  Over the course of the next few months in this blog, I will share different thoughts I have had relative to this experience.  Hopefully, some of what I write about will resonate with you, and if nothing else, give you a little more insight into the exchange that has impacted so many lives in our school district.

While this was the first time in Europe for me, my wife has traveled there before, and I remember a conversation with her about how surprised she was in regard to how much Europeans knew about our country.  And, on the flip side, how little we really know about Europe, other than a few things we learned in high school history classes.  Jay Leno used to do these “quizzes” on the street that were often about topics from history, primarily in my opinion to show how ignorant some people were about the world we live in.  He got some laughs and other people used those short clips to point fingers at school systems or “kids these days.”  What I found out in my time in Germany reinforced my wife’s view, and I was actually quite surprised how much people knew not only about our political system, but also about our economy, culture, and basically what goes on in many aspects of our society on a daily basis.  Yes, most of the time I was with highly educated people, but even when we had experience with others, this seemed to be true.

A number of years ago I read Thomas Friedman’s The World Is Flat, and in different settings I have referenced a number of things that I took away from that book.  Without going into a full-scale review or summary of the book, one of the fundamental points he makes is that due to technology and advances in communication we live in a “smaller” world.  We are a few keystrokes away from knowing what is going on, or being able to communicate with someone anywhere in the world.  In many ways there are not as many “mysteries” about places foreign to us because we can easily find out about them on the Internet.  Our students who have participated in the last two or three exchanges have communicated extensively with their German partners before even meeting them, and then more between visits.  A lot of this is done via social media, and so the kids were very tuned in as to what to expect when they arrived in each other’s homeland.  They were also more informed about each other’s interests, families, likes and dislikes, than in the past.

This smaller world also presented itself with signs, literally and figuratively, of the United States all over the place.  Our host drove a Skoda Citigo, a Czech manufactured vehicle.  I never heard of it, and as I started car watching on our walks and drives, I noticed a few other manufacturers I did not recognize.  At the same time, I saw a number of Fords, though they were all smaller compact cars.  We also saw a number of brown UPS trucks, though in Germany they were Mercedes Benz!  In many communities there was a McDonalds restaurant, and at the checkout in grocery stores one saw a number of familiar candy bars, such as Snickers and Kit Kat.  There was a Levi's store in a mall we visited, and a lot of people wearing Nike shoes.  We also went to an Aldi grocery store.  Oh wait, that is a German business that happens to be the faster growing grocer in the United States!

Something else that has happened is that because more information is available quickly, and because the United States is the dominant country in the world, people in other countries are hungry to know as much as they can about us.  They are very tuned in to our political situation, and many that I spoke to have established very strong beliefs about the President and current policies of the Republican Party.  More than one person remarked that based on recent foreign policy decisions, it will be decades before they trust our country if the GOP is in control.  I found that concerning, as I did the parallels that some of the people I met were drawing between the white nationalist emergence in our country and similar movements in the eastern region of theirs.  That was directly addressed by our tour guide during a visit my wife and I took to Dachau, the notorious concentration camp created in the 1930’s by the Nazis.  In fact, there was a very high level of concern expressed because our nation is viewed as a leader and if things like this are happening on our soil, they rationalized that it could happen anywhere.  

Taking all of this in, my “worry-ometer” has kicked in and I am truly concerned about how little our students know about the world, and for that matter many of us adults.  We do not have much of a global awareness or understanding compared to the average German.  They know how our economy works, and are very current on market trends in our country that have an impact beyond our border.  As the campaigns for the 2020 election are gearing up, some have studied the various Democratic candidates as much as any of us.  They are very tuned in to the migrant problems at our southern border, and easily compare it to similar situations in nearby countries.  I mention this because who among us can even name the major political parties in Germany, and outside of Angela Merkle, who are other political leaders in that country.  For that matter, beside Teresa May, Vladimir Putin, and Emmanuel Macron, who are the other leaders of European nations?  What countries belong to the European Union and what ones do not?  The people we talked to know a great deal about the various leaders in our nation, and have very strong opinions as to what they believe needs to happen.  

The United States is a model for the rest of the world, and while it may sound kind of goofy, in many ways, people want to be like us, or at least have many of the things we have.  Because of that they are very aware of most things American.  At the same time, the last thing that can happen to us is to continue this path toward isolation.  We must recognize that we are dependent on other nations, and in order to better work with them, we need to know more about them.  This exchange is a very small step toward that end, and while the fact that we have twenty kids share a couple of months with a German teen every two years does not lead to dramatic changes in the world order, it does make a difference in how some people view the world, or at least part of it.  It may matter more in the future when they are adults and have a vote, and perhaps make a decision to run for political office.  This smaller world is different from what it was in 1982 when this exchange started, but the mission is the same: to develop understanding and relationships among young people from different nations.  That mission is still very important and very much alive.

Prisons Are More Important Than Schools

I hope you disagree with the title of this article, because I certainly do.  However, if you look at the amount of money spent on both institutions over the past 33 years, there is no question that among politicians, and perhaps some other members of our society, it is more important to fund prisons than it is to fund education.  When one looks at how much a state spends on a prisoner compared to how much it spends on a child attending school, more money is spent in this country on the prisoner than the child.  According to a report by the personal finance site GoBankingRates, fifteen states spend at least $27,000 more per prisoner than they do per student, with California having the biggest gap, spending $64,642 per inmate compared to $11,495 per student.  That difference of $53, 146 is astounding!  In Iowa, the cost of educating a student is a bit under $10,000, while the cost spent on each inmate is over $30,000.  Just think what kind of education could be provided to our young people if those dollar amounts were flipped!  Or for that matter, find the average and fund them the same!

There is no question that our nation has a problem with incarceration, and perhaps some of the conversation about prison and sentencing reform you hear about every so often will come to fruition in the near future.  It is astounding that in the richest country in the world, while our country accounts for 4.4% of the world’s population, it also accounts for 22% of the world’s prison population.  The crazy thing about that statistic is that there are many other countries in the world that have far more restrictions on their citizenry and yet, do not have as many people confined.  Maybe even crazier is that in the United States, incarceration rates have tripled in the last thirty years despite crime rates falling!  How does that add up?  We are spending an incredible amount of taxpayer money, in some respects keeping for-profit, private prisons very much in the black, and at the same time short-changing the education of young people.

Within this inequity of spending, there exists some very interesting correlations between education and incarceration, students and prisoners.  The most obvious is that uneducated people are much more likely to end up in prison.  According to the U.S. Department of Education, 66% of state prison inmates have not graduated from high school, and for one demographic group in our country, black men aged 20-24, those without a high school diploma are more likely to be in jail or prison than to have a job.  It is not complicated, earn a high school diploma and stay out of jail!  Heck, we have examples in our own community of this!  Dropout of school, do something stupid because you do not have access to a good job, go to jail.  We read about these individuals in the police report all of the time!  According to former U.S. Secretary of Education John King, a 10% increase in high school graduation would result in a 9% decrease in criminal arrest rates.  Where should we put our money if we truly want to impact our future?

Another interesting statistic is that in our country it takes one prison guard to supervise an average of 5.3 prisoners, while each American teacher supervises an average of 20.8 students.  Of course that makes it more expensive simply looking at labor costs.  Toss in the fact that there are extreme shortages of educators in some parts of this country, even to the extent that teaching positions are going unfilled, and can you see where our focus is at?  Based on this, our nation places a higher priority on people giving attention to prisoners than to students.  It is more important that we have a lower guard to prisoner ratio than teacher to student!  How about we work to level that out a little bit?  I’m not saying move those prison guards into schools (though some may argue that would be helpful!), but I suspect being a teacher would be much more attractive if they did not have to deal with as many of the problems that they face on a daily basis.  That could be dealt with if schools had resources for mental health professionals and counselors to provide services to young people who bring all kinds of social and emotional issues into the building each day.

When one in three Americans of working age have a criminal record, that is a problem.  Not only does it create barriers to employment, it certainly does not bode well for an economy in need of workers.  Statistics tell us that if more people graduate from high school, fewer will become criminals, the number of prisoners will decline, and less money will be needed to operate jails and prisons.  So how about we invest up front, allocate money to education and mental health programs, and give our young people an opportunity to earn a quality education, rather than continuing to see our costly prison system expand.  Makes sense to me.