Not only is the population of Germany shrinking, those who remain have less and less adequate spelling skills.
Germany's education system looks good from outside the country, but if you believe the nay sayers ("Neinsager") and some conservative educators ("Dummköpfe"), German school children as well as many parents are not as proficient as desired.
Researchers have indeed found certain types of German spelling errors increase drastically over the past 40 odd years.
The causes and remedies are what the nasty fights of experts and politicians are about.
The noisier of the two camps' arguments can be summarized like this:
It's all the fault of those liberal teachers, and parents don't value hard work in school or demand a modicum of discipline from their children, and poor parents on social security assistance are the worst role models for children, and, oh, don't forget the immigrants who refuse to integrate into society.
More level headed observers will point out:
Changed teaching schedules mean children spent less time with a pen and paper, faithfully tracing letters. Modes of written communication have changed with email, texting, and social networks. Auto correction/spell checking makes it so you do not have to carry a full dictionary in your head. Maybe, just maybe, spelling is not exactly as important as believed.
To a foreigner, it sometimes seems funny that the Germans have a pretty strict view of what is correct and what is not while, at the same time, having been unable to figure out what "standard German" really is.
If this sound harsh, I can offer you an illustration. Somewhere in the depths of my library are a couple of books written in what is officially the "local dialect" in our hills. If you do not know any German, I'll send you a few pages of German, the local dialect, and some Dutch, and you'll pick the German text without cheating or googling.
Note: Our translation of "conservative educators" into German may be a bit negligent, we apologize.
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