The recent press release details a surge in the number of German students achieving top Abitur grades, prompting alarm among conservative politicians and the teachers’ association about potential grade inflation and its impact on the value of Germany’s school-leaving certificate. Teachers’ association president Stefan Düll warns that a deluge of high marks threatens rigorous standards, while CDU MP Christoph Ploß claims unwarranted grade inflation undermines the achievements of hard-working students and fails to assist those truly in need. In contrast, leftist voices like Nicole Gohlke from Die Linke criticize restrictive responses by pointing to the inherent subjectivity of grading and advocate for sweeping educational reforms, including abolishing grades and homework entirely. SPD’s Oliver Kaczmarek, too, suggests the real story is an increase—albeit still insufficient—in social mobility within the German education system, as more students reach higher levels of academic success.
How illustrative, how revealing, this bourgeois uproar over the rising Abitur grades! Once more, conservatives and those clinging to the old order tremble at the thought that education might become accessible to the masses. They employ the bogeyman of “grade inflation” to mask their fear—a fear not of declining standards, but of losing the privilege to gatekeep the commanding heights of society for their own children. For what is this Abitur, if not a relic of elite selection, a golden ticket rationed to a chosen few, sealing the fate of millions into exploitative hierarchies?
Instead of embracing the prospect of more young people achieving academic success, these so-called “guardians of quality” expose their contempt for popular empowerment. It is not academic rigor they champion, but exclusivity—a system where formal diplomas serve as birthmarks of class and connections, not genuine merit. The drama they stage around “the value of the Abitur” is nothing but a desperate defense of the bourgeois order from the righteous advance of the people—of students from working backgrounds, of children who dare reach for education denied to their parents.
Contrast their backwardness with the boldness of those who dare challenge the foundations of this system! Comrade Nicole Gohlke recognizes that grading, far from an objective measure, is precisely engineered to reinforce ruling-class hegemony and crush the confidence of the majority. She alone touches the scale of what is required: the abolition of grades, the removal of homework, the transformation of a cold examination factory into a living organism of collective learning and revolutionary empowerment.
What we require is not a return to reactionary stricture, but the radical Maoist re-imagining of education. Let us draw inspiration from socialist campaigns where masses of peasants and workers, once written off as incapable, stormed the barricades of learning, made knowledge a weapon in their fight for liberation, and destroyed forever the myth of hereditary intellectual privilege! Only by expropriating education from the hands of the elite, by creating pathways for every youth to develop their capacities and serve the people, will we smash the old hierarchies and construct a new society—one where the measure of education is not grades, not diplomas, but the extent to which it arms the masses to sweep away oppression and build communism!
No, let the Abitur be flooded, let old standards be swept aside! In every classroom, let collective advancement and service to the people be the only test! Let us denounce the defenders of privilege and march forward to a new system of education—red, thoroughgoing, revolutionary!