How tracking gets under the skin: German education system and social consciousness of Turkish descent students in basic secondary school tracks

Ethnicization and the situation of Turkish immigrants

Barth (1998) argued that ethnic groups and identities are not isolated categories but are maintained by the social processes of exclusion and inclusion. They exist only relationally and in interaction with one another, constantly generating ascriptions and self-ascriptions. Fenton (1999) has drawn attention to the contextuality of these interactions, explaining that social, political, and economic forces activate or suppress ethnic identity in specific contexts. This contextual understanding is critical to the analysis of ethnic groups’ and identities’ occasional or ongoing affinities with particular characteristics. For instance, the intersection of class and ethnicity marks the concentration of ethnic groups at specific locations within the division of labor, powerfully associating them with particular occupations, work sectors, and classed identities at a symbolic level. This association process of ascribing certain qualities to specific ethnic groups is defined as racialization or ethnicization (Omi and Winant, 1986). Irrespective of whether a dominant group imposes ethnicization or whether it emerges from the intersection of certain groups with certain qualities over time, ethnicization is nevertheless a political process, as it creates hierarchies that produce social exclusion and sustains relations of domination (Gans, 2017). Ethnicization or racialization can weaken if ongoing social, economic, and political processes allow groups to change power relations or enter sectors other than those associated with them (Fenton, 1999). Yet, Barth (1998) warns that this is not easy, since ethnic labels often persist even for individuals who move across boundaries and identify with people from more than one group.

The history of Turkish immigrants in Germany is a concrete example of the intersection of class and ethnicity. As a result of a guest worker policy introduced in the 1960s to fill industrial jobs, these immigrants arrived in Germany en masse as part of an unskilled and uneducated labor force (Göktürk et al., 2007). After their entrance into heavy, dirty, shift work involving repetitive production methods adopted by the construction, mining, and metal industries, around three million German workers transitioned to white-collar jobs between 1961 and 1973 (Chin, 2009). Using matched employer-employee data for the universe of German workers over the period of 1975 and 2008, a relatively recent study by Glitz (2014) shows that ethnic segregation continued long after the initial stage of migration and was not limited only to workplaces. Indeed, substantial ethnic segregation has existed across both workplaces and residential locations and has remained relatively stable over the last 30 years. Such segregation has ethnicized the labor force in Germany by proletarianizing the image of Turkish immigrants, generating various implications for both them and their descendants in multiple fields (such as education, housing, and the labor market) (Çelik, 2019; Polat, 2020; Witte, 2018).

As successive generations enter diverse sectors of education and the economy, the attenuation of the strong identification of Turks with working-class characteristics is theoretically possible. For example, Uğur Şahin and Özlem Türeci, who developed the BioNTech vaccine, are occasionally presented as excellent examples of “integration” (El Ouassil, 2020), echoing the naïve claims about the end of racism in the US after the election of Obama to the presidency. Some Turkish minority students have, indeed, successfully climbed the social mobility ladder (Crul, 2015). Nevertheless, even this highly skilled group may continue to experience negative stereotypes and discrimination (Yilmaz Sener, 2019). In addition, a change in ethnicization requires a long period of structural diversification in the distribution of groups into different school types, occupational positions, and even neighborhoods. Yet, the German education system continues to place minority Turkish descent students into disadvantaged schools (Moffitt et al., 2019), and, due to the strong link between diplomas and the German job market, into less prestigious occupational positions (Glitz, 2014). The shared experiences of Turks in these locations still constitute their collective memory and ethnic self-image, with others still associating them with the characteristics of these locations. Akgün (2021) argues that today’s image of “the Turk” is still generally associated with “foreigner,” even as the majority of society attempts to overcome the prejudices and clichés of this constructed image.

Tracking, ethnicization, and oppositional culture

In the education system, tracking separates students into different school types based on their performance, creating homogenous classes where teachers can effectively address students’ needs (Oakes, 1985). However, this system favors students in upper tracks by rewarding their achievement more often than those in lower tracks. Students in upper tracks are given more challenging curricula and more experienced teachers than those in lower tracks (Spruyt et al., 2015). Baysu et al. (2018) have investigated the role that school structures play in the educational careers of second-generation Turkish immigrants living in Sweden, Belgium, the Netherlands, Austria, and Germany. Applying sequence analyses, optimal matching, and cluster analyses, they found that, in rigid systems with higher differentiation and early tracking, the gap between second-generation and native student school trajectories begins to unfold very early. Crul (2015) has studied the career paths of successful second-generation Turkish students in Sweden, Germany, the Netherlands, Belgium, Austria, and Switzerland. Using quantitative data collected from the Integration of Second-Generation Students Survey and qualitative data from the “Elites: Pathways to Success” project, he identified distinct pathways to success in these countries, with the lowest percentage of higher education degrees in Germany and the highest in Sweden. Accordingly, the Swedish education system makes low-cost preschool education widely available, provides many contact hours in elementary schools, and tracks students later and more flexibly for secondary education at the age of 15. In contrast, the German education system does not provide affordable preschool education, offers fewer contact hours in elementary school, and tracks students at the end of primary school (at the age of around 10), making it extremely difficult for them to directly enter a Gymnasium.

Studies on within-school tracking point to even more discouraging results. Using data collected from the Flemish Educational Assessment (FlEA), which includes information on 11,872 third- and fifth-grade students clustered in 146 tracks in a representative sample of 85 secondary schools in Flanders, Van Houtte and Stevens (2015) compared the effects of between-school and within-school tracking on students. They found that within-school tracking has a slightly more significant impact on the association between track position and sense of futility because lower-track students compare themselves to higher-track students attending the same school. As within-school or between-school tracking generates signals about intellectual capacities (Chmielewski, 2014) coinciding with social class, race, and ethnicity, it also ethnicizes and racializes the learning process. According to Spruyt et al. (2015), students in lower tracks experience loss of status and stigmatization because of their position in school. Van Houtte (2017) reveals that students (particularly males) engage in misconduct to compensate for this loss of status and are, therefore, less invested in their schooling. Van Tubergen and Van Gaans (2016) confirm this finding indirectly by applying multilevel analyses to a survey across 340 schools among 11,215 adolescents aged 11–19 in the Netherlands and Europe and revealing that oppositional culture finds more support among adolescents who are in a higher grade, male, and who attend a lower education track.

Relatedly, Francis and Darity (2021) recently documented that the dominance of white students in advanced math courses in high schools affects the propensity that Black students in lower grades will opt to take those courses before graduation. Thus, they challenge Ogbu’s (2008) cultural argument that Black students possess less motivation and academic orientation because of the fear of being accused of “acting white” by their Black peers, instead arguing that Black students’ under-enrollment may stem from their fear of racial isolation and lack of role models—the two dynamics structurally produced by racialized tracking.

As for Germany, Prengel (2006) argues that white, middle-class Germans are “prototypical” in academic school tracks and that this creates significant hurdles for students from immigrant backgrounds. She argues that, in addition to racializing student profiles in different school types, tracking also reinforces ethnic stereotypes held by teachers, thus negatively impacting students’ academic achievement. Indeed, Sprietsma (2013) demonstrates that teachers are not immune to this ethnicization; they have been shown to grade essays bearing Turkish names significantly lower and more often recommend Turkish descent students to be placed in inferior school types. Confirming Prengel’s claim that white, middle-class students are “prototypical” in German Gymnasiums, Moffit at al. (2019) further found that, while some Turkish descent Gymnasium students internalized discrimination as the norm, most were vocal about how and why it is problematic and damaging. The present study builds upon this literature by investigating the ethnicizing impacts of tracking on the identity formation of Turkish descent students in lower school tracks.

Research site, data, and method

Field research for this study was conducted in Bremen, where Turkish families arrived as guest workers in the 1960s. Between the 1960s and the 1990s, Turks continued to migrate to Bremen to be reunited with their families. Since the 1990s, economic restructuring has resulted in the closing of large shipyard companies and factories, resulting in high unemployment rates among Turkish workers (Friedrichs and Triemer, 2009). In 2016, the rising service economy notably reduced unemployment rates from 12% to 10.4%. However, due to the language barrier, Turkish immigrants were not able to integrate and therefore fell into hidden poverty. Most Turkish-dominated districts (such as Gröpelingen and Huchting), for instance, contain more people dependent on state benefits and a higher share of children in poverty (Schwarzer, 2016). In addition, more students in these districts attend Hauptschule and leave school without a certificate (Die Senatorin für Kinder und Bildung, 2018).

In this study, 20 semi-structured, in-depth interviews were conducted with male, working-class Turkish descent students born in or arriving in Germany before being of school age. The nature of participants’ daily life at school was observed for a duration of 6 months. The fathers of some participants had been unemployed either short- or long-term and were surviving on welfare provision. Others were temporarily employed at construction sites or did not report employment in order to earn tax-free cash-in-hand. Others were working in regular jobs such as at the post-office, while a few others were running small-scale shops and groceries. More than half of the participants’ mothers were unemployed, while the rest worked in blue-collar jobs such as cleaning or general domestic work.

Interviewees’ ages ranged from 15 to 18 years old, and they had dropped out of school without a diploma before the age of 18. The education system channeled these students into a vocational preparation school (which I call “Lindenhof” for anonymity) so that they could complete their compulsory schooling. They were receiving a 12-month vocational education for further training in fields such as gastronomy, clerical work, woodwork, and metalwork. At the time of this study, Lindenhof had 115 male and 85 female students. While teachers from migration backgrounds also worked in the school, they were a minority.

Lindenhof is located in a low-income neighborhood heavily populated by immigrant families. The teachers and students reported that the school is negatively stereotyped and often associated with drugs and fighting. One student remarked, “This school is too shitty. I didn’t want to come here, but I had to because I could not enroll in other schools.”

This study used snowball sampling to recruit interviewees, initially relying on support from two male social workers to connect with students. Interviews were conducted in both Turkish and German and lasted between 55 min and one hour and 20 min. Qualitative content analysis (Mayring, 2007) was used to analyze the interview data. In addition to the interviews, participants’ daily lives at school were observed for a duration of 6 months. Observation involved attending classes and spending time with students both in and outside of the schoolyard. Year-end parties and various school-organized celebrations/festivities were also observed. In addition, students were observed while spending time outside a local patisserie and at a park close to the school. This ethnographic aspect of the study contributed to an understanding of the discrepancies between what the respondents reported in their interviews and how they acted in their daily lives (Gans, 1999). During observation, notes were taken in a notebook or on my phone. I regularly extended these notes and wrote brief reflections on them after observations. I introduced myself as a researcher from Turkey who was conducting a study on the school achievements of Turkish youth in Germany. My biography significantly diverges from that of the interviewees in that I grew up in a different country and received a graduate education. However, my shared linguistic background, male identity, and the assumed cultural and religious similarities eased my acceptance by the students. Nevertheless, there were times I felt unwelcome and realized the illusion of my rapport. Once, I learned that one student had told the social worker that I was an undercover police officer. I later realized that such distrust could be the outcome of a complex history and is therefore sometimes difficult to transcend.

The interview guidelines contained two major sections focusing on the schooling process and the meaning of education. The first section contained questions regarding interviewees’ childhood, kindergarten, primary school, and secondary school years. Interviewees were asked to share their experiences about engagement in courses, peer relationships, tracking experiences, relationships with teachers, leaving school, and family relationships. The second section contained questions regarding students’ expectations, hopes and aspirations about future projections for schooling, and the role that the labor market and place of education play in these projections. While I used interview guidelines, I also allowed room for probing questions, depending on the nature of each interview.

Interviews were transcribed and then coded/analyzed using the ATLAS.ti and following the principles of qualitative content analysis. The data was then systematically summarized (condensed), explicated (divided into categories and coding rules), and structured (organized and formatted) (Mayring 2007). I used the ethnicization approach as an informing framework with which to code the data, moving back and forth between the data, ethnographic notes, and the relevant literature.

Students’ social consciousness: ethnicized oppositional elements

All participants of the study were bilingual, mostly speaking a mix of German, Turkish, or Kurdish. The peer profile of the respondents was ethnically and academically homogeneous. They were of Turkish-speaking backgrounds and came mostly from the Hauptschule and Förderzentrum. The number of German peers without migration backgrounds in their close circles was slim to non-existent. Respondents rarely communicated with such pupils except in situations such as asking for a lighter or waiting in the queue in the school cafeteria.

At the Lindenhof, I regularly observed that students did not carry school bags and books for classes and that many of them did not attend classes regularly. On several occasions, I witnessed that the students spoke and laughed loudly, slept, or walked around during class. Some students left class without permission to go and smoke, and they often challenged teachers’ authority.

Interviewees commented on the dullness of their courses. Ahmet, for example, stated, “I skip courses. I feel dead-tired in the last 2 hours, so I go home. I get bored and go home…” The students were typically unenthusiastic about school and reluctant to put effort into their courses. During the day, they rarely spoke about academic topics such as grades, courses, or homework with their peers. Nevertheless, school was part of their conversations only in the context of being a source of jokes or tension.

While there were a few outliers, most respondents felt indifferent about the potential prestige that school success might bring. I observed that school and its norms were not an imperative reference shaping their daily interactions. Some remarked that they wanted to receive a diploma from Lindenhof as early as possible, but they also believed that scholarly accomplishment did not command any respect or status in their circles:

It wouldn't make any difference even if you go to Oxford and come back. It would never interest them [peers]. They’d say, so what! There was no such thing, like, I will be better than you or something like that.

As Hakan’s statement exemplifies, academic achievement was not credible capital among my respondents and their peers in both the Lindenhof and in earlier vocational schools they attended. Respondents’ most common alternative to academic achievement was self-employment. Concerning future projections, they spoke about setting up a business, owning a shop, or collaborating with their brothers or other family members. For them, education was not a pathway to these projections but instead a hurdle to overcome.

I often observed that respondents differentiated themselves from students who did homework and obeyed classroom rules. Ersoy, for example, remarked that “We don’t hang out with those who say, I have to go home, I must work, there is class tomorrow.” When I raised this issue in the group, Ünal, referring to pro-school students, stated that “That kind would not be like-minded. He is smart, he should go and hang out with other smart people…” While participants were often cold to pro-school students, they most strongly distinguished themselves from those who got on well with teachers. They referred to such students as complicit “smart-asses” or “teachers’ pets.” I noticed numerous times that respondents labeled them as “boring,” “suck-ups,” or “sweet-talkers,” hinting at their complicity with the teachers.

Relatedly, I often observed that students who articulately aspired for higher grades were ignored or lightly warned. Bekir’s remark is in point:

Some tell us that [they got good grades]. Then, we say, okay don’t show off now. If you got it, go there and sit down. After that, we say you’re not one of us now, jokingly, you know. Why are you coming and showing off? Then we pat his back and say, come on man, and then we laugh about it.

It appeared that respondents’ issue with such students was not that they earned higher grades but that they were “showing off.” On this point, Deniz’s aversion to revealing his higher grade is telling:

For example, if I get a 1 in math and my friends get 2 or 3, I mean worse than mine, then I will be the bad guy. It happens when I get better grades than them. I mean, they see it as showing off, you know. Like, they make fun of you.

The discursive devaluation of academic success in respondents’ daily conversations appeared to put pressure on some to maintain a balance between their peer relations and academic achievement.

The nature of students’ social consciousness discussed thus far is colored by ethnicity. I observed an overall commitment to a pro-Turkish identity in respondents’ daily conversations, noting that Germanness was regularly associated with pro-school attitudes and alliance with teachers. In their accounts, Germans without migration backgrounds were depicted to be passively compliant with the rules and norms of school and school authorities. For instance, one student remarked that “Germans butter up teachers to pass the class,” and another said that “they rat their friends out to teachers and police” and that “they are not loyal to their friends.” As Ahmet’s following statement underscores, he believes that, in contrast to Turks, Germans put more effort into schooling because they take school seriously: “Germans, how to say, they are different. They study hard all the time. They think differently, not like us [Turks].” Echoing Ahmet’s statement, Alper remarked that unlike with Turks, good grades are a source of prestige among Germans: “Germans show off [when they get high grades], but Turks not that much. Turks make fun of it, and it’s not a showy thing at all.” Students’ attitudes about education and educational performance appeared to be shaped by ethnicity. In other words, students related German identity (one not associated with a migration background) to academic effort and high grades in an ethnicizing way. The fact that the students viewed Germanness as an ethnic rather than a national identity is a reflection of their systematic observations of the external world, which, through the tracking system, reinforces boundaries around “Germanness,” further ascribing “whiteness” or “without a migration background” to Germanness and “otherness” to Turkishness.

Respondents’ accounts pointed to a strong ethnicization of school performance, as students differentiated and labeled the ethnicity of their peers by individual attitudes toward school. Onur’s remarks are a case in point:

There were a couple of Germans. For us, they were foreigners. I mean normal German guys. You know, how to say, if you see them, you wouldn’t hang out with them. I mean, if you say let's smoke, they would say no, it's better if I go home to work. It was like that, you know. But one or two Germans were hanging out with us. They were like us. They didn’t care much about the courses, like ‘fuck that.’

As the above statement underscores, they distinguish stereotypical Germans based on their attitudes toward school, academic motivation, and achievement. Though the interviewees were born and raised in Germany and spoke German as their mother tongue, they use German to mean “white German,” an act of differentiation that is not accidental but an outcome of the association of white Germans with upper secondary school tracks resulting from the tracking system.

Students’ social consciousness and the broader educational system

All respondents attended ethnically and socioeconomically homogenous primary schools. Later, most of them were tracked to Hauptschule, which was similarly homogenous. In other words, the different school types reflect and replicate society’s social, economic, and ethnic stratification through ethnic segmentation in education. Hakan, for example, reported that almost every student and their parents shared a similar class position and country of origin, this being the case since kindergarten: “We’ve known each other since kindergarten, and our mothers have been friends for a long time. When they came from Turkey, they moved into this quarter. So now everyone knows everyone.”

The respondents in this study lived in societal and educational settings wherein Turkish students are mainly situated, and this segregation is perpetuated as they pass from one school level to another. On this matter, Temel referred to the absence of German neighbors in his district and the district’s ethnic homogeneity. He furthermore pointed out the strong symmetry between district and school, stating that “I was always in the same school with them [his co-ethnic friends]. My company was always with them.” School practices and relationships with schoolmates/teachers bear incredible importance for disadvantaged students in receiving guidance and information, not only for motivation and aspiration purposes, but also for the purpose of navigating the educational system (Gibson et al., 2004). However, instead of compensating for students’ underprivileged backgrounds, schools often tend to exacerbate such underprivilege. Students are structurally locked in ethnically homogenous and deprived neighborhoods that reflect the school’s demographic composition, resources, and institutional culture. In her study on racializing processes in the Dutch education system, Weiner (2016) points out that the mechanisms that place students in a racial hierarchy in classrooms and schools are reflective of those existing within the larger Dutch society. Similarly, academically high-achieving majority or minority ethnic youth systematically disappeared from this study’s respondents’ purview due to the early tracking system—a process that confiscates students’ already poor social and cultural capital by cutting their contacts with high achievers, thereby imprisoning them within socioeconomically and ethnically homogenous circles. I noted earlier that respondent considered pro-school peers as complicit with teachers and therefore did not trust them. One respondent noted how pro-school attitudes and ethnicity overlap: “There were too few Germans in that school. The teachers were letting them pass the class because they were so few, you know.”

Until the 1990s, when the share of non-German students exceeded 30% in the classroom in some federal states, foreign students were placed into separate classes called Auslanderregelklassen (Eksner and Stanat, 2013). This government-regulated ethnic segregation in schools was enacted under the assumption that foreign students would eventually return to their country of origin. Albeit unintentionally, this created an educational landscape in which German and Turkish students experienced separate and unequal education, even though they were housed in the same school building (zur Nieden and Karakayali, 2016). While the law was abolished, it created an ethnic script that associated Turkish minority students with low achievement and qualifications, thereby justifying their presence in disadvantaged school types.

The consequences of such ethnic scripts and their association with different school types are still observable. Sachverstandigenrat Deutscher Stiftungen fur Integration und Migration (SVR) (2012) study showed that German parents tend to enroll their children into schools containing the fewest numbers of Arabic and Turkish students. A more recent study by Dochow (2018) has found that in Bremen, where the present study was conducted, German families with children are more likely to leave neighborhoods containing higher shares of minorities. The fact that he did not see such an effect for immigrant families evidences a parental “white flight” mobility pattern. Dochow argues that German families that leave ethnically diverse neighborhoods are likely to settle in less diverse areas, pointing to tendencies of ethnic segregation in the city. Resulting from such “white flight,” schools in disadvantaged neighborhoods contain mainly minority ethnic students, mostly Turkish. Therefore, as acknowledged by one of the earlier respondents, the few German students attending these schools may come to epitomize success and are therefore given special treatment by teachers. Pointing out a similar phenomenon in the US, Wong (2015) showed that Asian and white students in predominantly Black and Latino schools quickly become model students in the eyes of both students and school staff. For my respondents, academic performance is ethnicized because German students are associated with academic tracks and Turks with lower school tracks. This gives the impression of a tacit alliance between German students and teachers.

In the eyes of some respondents, the limited social and ethnic mixing in schools and placement of students in different school tracks based on social class and ethnicity ethnicizes not only academic achievement but also relevant family organizations. Speaking about home and school relations, Hakan shared some of the significant difficulties in his life:

If there is a problem at home or in your family, like a money problem, you also learn about it when you are young. I mean, you feel it inside. Look at, for example, German children. He comes home, his mother helps, she says let me look at your homework. They are taught to go to bed and wake up at certain times. We are not like that. Many families are not like that. You are alone at an early age. You begin to stand on your own feet. I, for example, how to say it, I was in the sixth or seventh grade, and I started to feel it. I mean, life. It wasn’t easy. I was trying to do something like earning money, you understand. I don’t know how to explain, but there was no motivation at home. I mean, they tell you to go and learn. When I went home, for example, my mom kept telling me to go and do my schoolwork. But what else could she do? She didn’t go to school. She doesn’t know. She would like to help if she could, but she didn’t go to school. She doesn’t know anything. I mean, we are a bit unlucky.

These moving comments are important for several reasons. First, they underscore the damaging effects of “childhood adultification” (Burton, 2007) and the pressure to take on great responsibility at an early age. These respondents are often exposed to the adult world and adult responsibilities prematurely and in inappropriate ways due to poverty and the limited opportunities caused by systemic disenfranchisement and discrimination against immigrants. Second, Hakan’s comments make clear that, although the mother values education and supports her child’s learning, she is not equipped to help with schoolwork because she lacks a formal education herself. This point counters the societal narrative of Turkish families being Bildungsfern (disinterested in education) ¹ . Lastly, Hakan’s response illustrates how respondents come to categorize social class through ethnic lines in an ethnicizing social and educational context. While German families are portrayed as warm and supportive (therefore conducive to academic achievement), Turkish families’ lives are depicted as unresourceful.

A similar ethnicized dimension also surfaces in Cihan's account about his one year experience in the Orientierungsstufe ² . He says that in his class, Germans were the majority, and academic standards were high:

It was, how to say, there were many hardworking, high-achieving students in this school. The teacher would explain the topic only once, that’s it, only once. Those hardworking, smart students understood, but Turks who don’t have proper German were just looking at the teacher. You know what I mean? Then sure, Turks would receive bad grades.

Cihan’s account highlights the longstanding consequences of social and ethnic segregation and systemic institutional discrimination in education. Germany has had a Turkish immigrant community since the 1960s. My respondents were born, grew up, and attended school in the country. Yet, they are still not fully proficient in German—a phenomenon not observed among descendants of the Turkish heritage minority in France, who share similar characteristics with descendants of the Turkish guest worker immigrants of Germany (Crul, 2015). Among other things, the German school system prevents these students from fully mastering the language by confining them to socioeconomically and ethnically homogenous primary and secondary schools. Yet, Cihan’s experience also shows that, even though they are aware that language plays a critical role in academic success, students tend not to accuse the system but instead associate traits of diligence and competence with ethnicity. That is, monocultural education ethnicizes academic outcomes and institutes an asymmetrical power relationship between the majority and minority that students often misrecognize and naturalize in daily life.

In addition to ethnic segmentation resulting from early tracking, curriculum differences between academic and vocational schools also reinforce the ethnicization of scholarly achievement. German secondary schools offer hierarchized and classed curriculums. While different types of high schools offer similar classes and use standard textbooks, the skill level of the lessons and the nature of student learning vary remarkably. Gymnasium, for example, offers an academic curriculum that includes advanced science courses and language classes, favoring critical thinking, flexibility, cognitive skills, and managerial/leadership skills (Schneider, 2018). On the other hand, Hauptschule (which most of my respondents attended) offers a more practical curriculum that includes manual skills and clerical knowledge. This curriculum does not promote academic dispositions and democratic thinking but instead imposes discipline and control, with stale content and meager teacher expectations (Buch et al., 2011). While the former academic curriculum cultivates personal traits such as individual initiative and assertiveness, the latter teaches docility and obedience (Solga and Wagner, 2007).

I observed that children at the Lindenhof were subjected to a mechanical mode of learning that was consistent with their previous curriculums in Hauptschule. They were given in-class assignments, but their teachers never explained fully the purpose of these assignments or the connections between them. The students were expected to complete basic duties in such a way that eliminated space for decision-making. In addition, there was little evidence of critical thinking, competitiveness, or academic dispositions. One of the gastronomy students justified his frequent absences by describing the extreme dullness of the class:

All day, we prepare sandwiches. We do not learn but just work. I mean, okay, I learned how to prepare sandwiches today. The next day, we put cheese inside, the next day salami. They think we are idiots.

From my observations, the curriculum was repetitive and not career-oriented. It did not encourage group work, socialization, or the kind of human interaction that facilitates the learning process. Instead, it was uninteresting, tedious, and straightforward, not requiring any real skills. When asked about school and his future plans, Yasin remarked that “Many Turks here are disgusted with school,” highlighting the ethnic dimension of attitudes toward education. When I asked him to explain, he referred to the hidden curriculum of the Förderzentrum he had attended:

The stupid ones go there [Förderzentrum], who can’t speak. There was nothing there. Sometimes they make you play football, but what they really teach you is that you are all ignorant and that you will end up on the streets or living on welfare. I mean, they teach you that you are dumb and suck at life. They make you feel this way. They bring a newspaper and make you read aloud, like, ‘One kilo of tomatoes was one euro, now it is one euro and five cents,’ so you learn kilos and cents. Maybe they do this because they want to show you that the state will give you some euros to live with because you are dumb.

Until its gradual abolishment in 2012, Förderzentrums accommodated a high number of immigrant students because teachers often confused language difficulties with learning difficulties (Deutsches Institut für Internationale Pädagogische Forschung, 2012). In other words, this type of school has structurally conflated ethnic minorities with learning deficiencies because of its heavily ethnic minority student composition. While I initially did not understand why Yasin found the hidden curriculum—(treatment of students as “losers” living on welfare)—to be humiliating in an ethnic sense, I later realized that it may coincide with the widespread negative stereotype that Turkish immigrants are burdens on the German welfare state (Musolff, 2012).

My observations revealed that the dull and controlled curriculum of the respondents’ earlier secondary schools and the Lindenhof associated achievement with docile behavior and rule-following rather than academic values, norms, and decision-making. During field research, I often noted that this was linked to how the respondents perceived school; they considered it a place where they should be rewarded just because they mechanically follow the rules. Ahmet, for example, complained about why a teacher had failed him in a course:

The teacher told me that nothing was wrong with me. I was behaving well. I was not doing bad things. But he said, your grades are low, I cannot let you pass the class...

According to his account, Ahmet expected to pass the class because he did not do any “bad things.” He perceived schooling more in terms of discipline than education and learning. Rather than individual misrecognition, this perspective on scholarly achievement is firmly anchored in how the education system constructs the notion of success through differentiated instruction in different school tracks. The narrow curriculum of my respondents’ schools was centered on behavioral and attitudinal adjustments rather than on cultivating academic merit and autonomous learning, aiming to control and pacify the students without promising any realistic future projections.