Conflicts over religious dress, being kept away from school activities and “systematic and prolonged humiliation based on religious matters” are part of everyday life at many schools in the Neukölln district of Berlin. This is shown by a qualitative survey conducted by the Association for Democracy and Diversity in Schools and Vocational Education at ten schools in the district.
School administrators and teachers at half of the schools surveyed report that the problem of “confrontational religious expression” is deeply embedded in everyday life. Four other schools complained about “regular individual cases”, only one school reported that there were no problems in this area. The association understands the term to mean religiously connoted behaviour that is acted out in the school public sphere and aims to attract attention or to provoke or humiliate.
Together with the district office of Neukölln, the association has been granted federal funds to take stock of a “contact and documentation office for confrontational expressions of religion”. The first results were presented on Monday. According to the inventory, the schools surveyed are located in “increasingly socially segregated catchment areas”, where more than 90 per cent of the children come from mostly Muslim families with a non-German language of origin. At many of these schools, there is an “everyday culture that endangers democracy and restricts freedom”, says project leader Michael Hammerbacher.
Students from Muslim families in particular are under strong pressure to adapt, for example in terms of behaviour during the fasting month of Ramadan, dealing with religious minorities or the headscarf. “It is not enough that the pupils privately decide in favour of a stricter interpretation of Islam. Increasingly, such views are dominating the mainstream, with increasingly clear demands that these rules also be observed by others,” the inventory states. “This then also applies to educational staff, provided they themselves have a Muslim migration background.”
For example, the head of one school reported that teachers and students there had been challenged about their “summer clothes”. The management of another school stated that a pupil told a staff member of Arab origin that he did not listen to her because she was a “very bad Muslim” due to her lack of a headscarf. The boy’s father, who was called in, had encouraged his son in his behaviour.
The schools concerned also reported problems with prayer rules. For example, one student left an online conference during the lockdown saying that she now had to pray. “Parents said they would behave in a similar way in the future if prayer times clashed with school requirements.
Hammerbacher reports that he experienced a “fearful climate” during the interviews to speak openly about the problem situation. The schools surveyed therefore remain anonymous. Tilmann Kötterheinrich-Wedekind, headmaster of the Ernst-Abbe-Gymnasium in Neukölln’s Sonnenallee, does however speak up. He reports of fathers who forbid their daughters to take part in sports lessons if they are not allowed to wear long robes there – and state of their own accord that they would accept a grade of F for their children if in doubt. However, there are safety problems with this type of clothing, for example in ball sports or apparatus gymnastics.
“During Ramadan, we had pupils in the toilets who made sure that their classmates did not drink during the break,” says Kötterheinrich-Wedekind. Younger pupils have also been told by their parents that they must observe prayer times and, if necessary, pray in the toilets if they are denied facilities. “It lowers exam results when children can’t concentrate because of religious rules,” says the headmaster. “There is a religious pressure to perform. My central goal is for children to be able to develop freely.”
Almost all of the schools surveyed focused on the topic of gender roles on their own initiative. “The bad thing is that girls are often taught very clearly in their families: Education is not the goal. You don’t have to be an individual,” said one school headmaster. There is “an extremely revalued mother role and increasing sexual hostility”. The head of another school reported of secular or liberal parents who experienced “that their daughters wear the headscarf, although the women in the family do not wear one, because the girls get recognition for it at school”. In particular, young girls, who previously “like the boys” were lively in the playground, got “into a very classical role and withdraw” because of the headscarf.
Another headmaster reported that “the boys dominate the narrative” there, even though two-thirds of the student body is made up of girls. If female students had relationships or expressed liberal views in sex education classes, they were tackled. There is “a very conservative male minority that claims to control as many as possible, but especially the girls, in terms of traditional interpretations of values”.
The Neukölln project on confrontational expressions of religion has so far only received three months of funding – it is still unclear whether new funds will be approved. Only if this is the case can the contact and documentation office start its work next year. “Again and again in recent years we have received calls for help from educational institutions because certain religious interpretations do not allow tolerance for other opinions or even for scientific findings,” said Neukölln District Mayor Martin Hikel ( Social Democratic Party). “Peaceful coexistence can only exist, however, if everyone has a right to individual, free opinion and decision.”
Why are moslems getting away with things like this?
Because we are letting them
Germany you are in so much trouble