“Education is the key” announced the daily newspaper the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung in discussing “success stories” about “guest worker children” in 2008.1 For decades, journalists and scholars have debated challenges of “integration” and “multiculturalism,” asking if people with different ethnic backgrounds can in fact live together peaceably. Georg Meck argued a strong yes. Referring to the millions of people who migrated to the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG) between 1955 and 1973, the article’s author implicitly defined migrants’ success as integration and participation in (West) German society. Meck’s examples were about people who climbed the social ladder and joined the ranks of skilled professionals. For each measure, completing compulsory schooling was the necessary step.2
Dozens of journalists, educators, and European governments have shared that opinion for decades.3 Public schools, particularly primary schools, serve as a place for migrant children and the children of migrants to come into contact with host-country nationals, learn the language of the state, and imbibe social norms.4 After all, in primary school citizens and migrants learn their basic three Rs of reading, writing, and arithmetic side by side, while in secondary school, students acquire advanced skills to prepare them for life in a technologically based, skilled labor market. Those 8 to 13 years of education, establishing a national narrative and teaching civic participation, also train children in behavioral norms as well as what it means to be good citizens in the future.5
That emphasis on the future was part of the reason most western states began implementing compulsory schooling laws for their citizens in the nineteenth century.6 Initially, compulsory schooling was about teaching good subjecthood within an Empire or Kingdom and literacy in order to take advantage of a country’s human resources. A soldier and a factory worker were more capable of fulfilling their assigned tasks with a basic education. Adding to the importance of training human resources, as many states across western Europe became democracies , it became important for children to learn to read in order to act as an informed citizenry in a democratic state. Moving into the twentieth century, particularly after 1945, groups like the United Nations and Council of Europe redefined compulsory schooling to be about the individual as well as the state. Education was now “necessary for the fulfillment of any other … right” and vital for the individual’s quality of life.7 Schooling was necessary for an individual to be socially mobile and to access the multilayered labor market.8 Still true today, education was and is essential for children to have equal opportunities.9
In the post-1945 world, supranational communities like UNESCO (founded in 1945), the Council of Europe (founded in 1949), and later the European Community (EC, founded in 1958) reinforced international emphasis on human rights—including the right to education—for citizens and non-nationals alike.10 After the war, the Allied Powers and other state leaders believed that in order to avoid another global catastrophe like the Second World War, nation-states needed to communicate with one another and also include minority groups within the framework of the nation. As the authors of the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) laid out in the preamble, “recognition of the inherent dignity and of the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family [was] the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world.”11 These rights needed to be elevated above the citizen and applied to the human. All people needed the right to personhood, the right to security, and the right to work, to name only a few.12 Education, as a foundational right, was necessary for the realization of the others. But, as among these supranational entities only the EC had any legislative powers, those international recommendations were largely trends individual states had to choose to implement and enforce.
Furthermore, as Pierre Bourdieu pointed out in the 1970s, schools reproduced social divisions.13 That argument applied to the socio-economic divisions Bourdieu analyzed, but also between ethnic and national groups. Schools, after all, were where children learned to be citizens.14 Most nation-states wanted their citizens to have a clear loyalty to the state. The children of migrants, born to foreign nationals but educated in the host country, might feel connected to their parents’ countries of citizenship in addition to their current homes. That possibility of mixed identification raised concerns for the nation-state governments involved. As Abdelmalek Sayad pointed out in his book The Suffering of the Immigrant, most states wanted their residents to have a clear ethnonational affiliation corresponding with their citizenship status. If a child with Turkish citizenship lived in West Germany (or, for Sayad , children with Algerian ties in France), that child needed to be either Turkish or German, but not both. Instead, nation-state governments tried to teach a clear divide between those who were in and out. When learning in school who counted as “German,” children also learned who was not (i.e., the child with Turkish citizenship ).15 In that process, children absorbed whether school, society, and jobs were for “them.” Children with Turkish citizenship in West Germany or Algerian citizenship in France often learned it was not.16
Inclusion and exclusion within a national group depended both on social and legal acceptance, for which there was no clear norm.17 States like France and the Netherlands acknowledged inherited national identity but emphasized the learned. Through the twentieth century, both states, colonial empires, combined some levels of access to citizenship based on both jus soli and jus sanguinis.18 Children born in and/or living for a minimum length of time in those countries could apply to naturalize. Culture was something you learned from your parents, but also absorbed from society and were taught in school.19 The Empire of Germany, in contrast, passed a 1913 citizenship law, claiming ethnonational Germanness was inherited through blood and not learned. Even before the Third Reich used that law to justify its brutality, that ethnic-based citizenship caused problems for the Polish-speaking populations in the Ruhr region and East Prussia as it provided legal justification for discrimination and explicit othering.20 It was that law the Federal Republic of Germany kept in 1949, instead of revising for inclusion.21
Despite those apparent legal differences, in the post-1945 world actual implementation of citizenship law bore some disturbing similarities between most western European states regarding inclusion and exclusion of different ethnic groups, including the diverse labor migrants moving across the European continent. In counties like France, despite a narrative of equality and theoretical access to civil rights, the children of French citizens from the colonies often faced housing discrimination. Forced to live in shanty towns, the children’s school buildings, if existent, were frequently dilapidated and learning materials all but nonexistent. Despite a centralized system supposed to ensure equal education opportunities, schools often taught children—particularly from places like Algeria—that France was not in fact theirs. In West Germany, in contrast, children with non-German citizenship did not have access to citizenship and were not entitled to civil rights (defined as rights for citizens).22 Without that status, even as children reportedly possessed equal education opportunities, they did not have the same access to schools, in part because once again housing discrimination pushed the development of parallel societies, which often received fewer resources . Excluded from the nation, these migrant groups and their descendants did not have the same right to education, regardless of the law.23
Precisely who ...