Helene Lange School (Wiesbaden)

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Helene Lange School
Wiesbaden Helene Lange School.jpg
Main building of the Helene Lange School
type of school Comprehensive school
founding 1847
address

Langenbeckplatz 6-18

place Wiesbaden
country Hesse
Country Germany
Coordinates 50 ° 4 '30 "  N , 8 ° 15' 25"  E Coordinates: 50 ° 4 '30 "  N , 8 ° 15' 25"  E
management Carmen Bietz
Website www.helene-lange-schule.de

The Helene-Lange-Schule (abbreviated: HLS) is an integrated comprehensive school in Wiesbaden and one of 18 UNESCO project schools in Hesse and a Club of Rome school since 2009 .

history

The Helene Lange School was founded in 1847 as a " Higher Daughter School " on Luisenplatz in Wiesbaden. Due to war damage to the building, she moved to a new school building on Langenbeckplatz in 1955 and was named the Helene Lange School after the women's rights activist Helene Lange . At that time the school was an all-girls high school.

This changed in 1971 when boys were first admitted. Three years later, grades 11 to 13 were converted into an independent upper level, today's Martin-Niemöller-Schule . The two schools are closely connected to one another to this day.

In 1986, under the direction of Enja Riegel, the school was converted into an integrated comprehensive school with a reform pedagogical profile. In 1987 it was accepted as a UNESCO project school.

Enja Riegel retired in 2003. Her successor was Ingrid Ahlring, who was the headmaster until 2012. Eric Woitalla managed the school between 2012 and 2019. The Helene Lange School has been run by Carmen Bietz since 2019.

particularities

After Enja Riegel became the headmaster in 1986, she made it her business to completely convert the school. She reduced the class sizes to 25 students and the years to four classes. With the support of the teaching staff, she tore down some of the unused classrooms in order to create large lounge areas in which the students could carry out free work independently. The school should expressly become a “living space” for students and teachers. In the project weeks after schooling, new class groups set up themselves, for example they design tables and chairs themselves. At the Helene Lange School, independence is very important.

But the traditional form of frontal teaching has also been changed. Each school year, projects lasting several weeks take place, which are then carried out over a certain period of time, closely interlinked with conventional specialist teaching. They are intended to promote a holistic understanding and usually end with a presentation. In addition, parties, celebrations, school theater, events in front of the school public, but also trips and projects together shape school life.

Drama is a special focus of the school. The school has its own theater workshop, in which whole classes rehearse and perform plays, sometimes under the supervision of a professional director.

Since 1988 the school has been involved in a development aid project in Nepal as part of its UNESCO work . The HLS has been a Club of Rome School since 2009. The school is a member of the school association 'View over the fence' .

Student body

Most of the students at the Helene Lange School are from the upper middle class. The parents' low unemployment rate is striking. Reference was made to selection processes: “In summary, [the students at the Helene Lange School] are a socially positively selected group. This favorable selection is presumably a consequence of the attractive educational profile of the HLS. The supportive background of the students manifests itself in the above-average educational qualifications of the parents, as well as the large number of books that are available in the household and represent an indicator of cultural capital (Bourdieu 1985). "

successes

On November 13, 2002, the Max Planck Institute for Human Development presented the results of the PISA study to the press . As a result, many newspapers declared the Helene Lange School the PISA winner. The Max Planck Institute did not agree with this presentation. The school only took part in the PISA study with a small sample, which is why no representative results can be expected. The data collected were therefore intended exclusively for internal use within the school. The schools were made aware of this fact in an accompanying letter. Nevertheless, the results made it to the public. According to the German Teachers' Association, the unrepresentative value was also not at the top of the test results. In comparison with results from secondary schools in southern Germany, the value ranks in the bottom third.

In December 2007 the school became one of the winners of the German School Prize .

criticism

The HLS has the prerogative, which goes back to the SPD government, to admit school beginners four weeks before the neighboring schools. It is reported from parenting that pupils who were recommended to secondary school were disadvantaged. The school's student body is made up of 55 percent recommended high school students, 30 percent recommended secondary schools and 15 percent recommended secondary schools. Education researcher Frank-Olaf Radtke also reported that school disadvantages children with a migrant background. She tries to keep the proportion of children with a migration background in her classes as low as possible. The school is pursuing a "creaming strategy". “Loosely translated, that means she picks out the raisins. When places are tight, students are selected with whom one expects to be able to work successfully in competition with high schools. "

The headmistress commented on the criticism and said that every year she makes sure that at least 10 percent of the students in the entrance classes have a migration background. However, this only succeeds with difficulty, as fewer students with a migration background are registered at HLS.

Abuse cases at school in 1989

In December 2010, reports made headlines that the estate of Hajo Weber, the art teacher who worked for 20 years at the Helene Lange School and who died there in 2008 and who died in 2008, also contained numerous child pornographic pictures he had made himself and discovered by journalists and were subsequently confiscated by the police. The photos went back decades. It is still unknown whether students from the Helene Lange School can also be seen on it. Weber was suspended from classes at the school in 1989 after it became known that he had misconducted several students. A schoolgirl who was confided by five students reported the abuse to her class teacher. The headmistress at the time, Riegel, immediately informed the staff, the parents and, in her own words, also the education authority in full, but neither did the parents concerned or the responsible education authority, and the incident was not recorded in Weber's school authority files either (only, that he was “difficult to use in teaching”), so that the teacher could initially work in the Hessian teacher training with the same salary and later even continued to teach at the German school in Bogotá in Colombia and most recently at the Wiesbaden Kerschensteiner vocational school. Even after his release, the state education authority tolerated Weber attending school. Enja Riegel let him work as a photographer in 1997 on a book about the Helene-Lange-Schule (on which the reform pedagogue Gerold Becker , who later became known for abuse cases at the Odenwaldschule, also worked) and the state education authority allowed him to accompany a school trip as a photographer before that about which parents complained to her in 1994. School principals do not decide on the use of teachers in their schools. That is the responsibility of the state education authority. Riegel himself went public with the case again at the beginning of 2010, after cases of abuse at other reform education schools such as the Odenwald School had previously made big headlines. In an immediately withdrawn press release from her attorney at the time, she said that she had never “had the impression that the students were harmed in any way”. However, the five students who were affected at the time later told reporters that they could not remember that they had been questioned about their health. Former teachers at the Helene Lange School justified this in an open letter in the "Frankfurter Rundschau". According to their account, they sought advice from the father of an affected student who was a psychologist by profession. He had warned urgently against suspending the injured boys interrogation and negotiations. According to the former teachers, in 1989 the class teacher of the affected students and that father, together with all parents of the affected students, spoke about the abuse, explained their rights and offered them psychological help. According to the teachers, the result of these discussions was that all parents rejected Hajo Weber's complaint. Riegel also said in March 2010 that she would react differently today and report the case. According to her own words, the headmistress had no knowledge of the child pornographic images in Weber's estate. Weber's pictures ended up in the city archives mainly because he had built a reputation for himself as a photographer of the anti-nuclear movement in the 1970s and 1980s.

literature

A detailed list of publications can be found on the school's website.

  • Enja Riegel: School can succeed! How our children really learn for life. The Helene Lange School Wiesbaden . Collaboration with Armin Beber. Fischer-Taschenbuch-Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 2005, ISBN 3-596-16168-1 .
  • Gerold Becker , Arnulf Kunze, Enja Riegel, Hajo Weber: Learning differently - design and reality. Bergmann & Helbig Verlag, Hamburg 1997.
  • My school, your school, our school. Wiesbaden 2006.
  • Olaf Köller, Ulrich Trautwein (ed.): School quality and student performance. Juventa, Weinheim / Munich 2003.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Olaf Köller and Ulrich Trautwein: School quality and student performance: Evaluation study on innovative school development at five comprehensive schools in Hesse. Juventa, Weinheim, Munich, 2003, p. 67.
  2. ↑ a b c Max Planck Institute for Human Development: Statement on the dpa report on the PISA results of the Bielefeld Laboratory School and the Helene Lange School in Wiesbaden dated November 13, 2002 ( online ; PDF; 68 kB)
  3. ^ A b Josef Kraus: Information and comments on the PISA results of the Bielefeld laboratory school and the Helene-Lange-Schule Wiesbaden . German Teachers' Association (DL) - Aktuell, December 10, 2002 ( online ( memento from September 15, 2007 in the Internet Archive ), accessed on March 10, 2008)
  4. ↑ a b Cannot accept everyone - academics accuse comprehensive schools of “institutional discrimination”. Wiesbadener Kurier from August 21, 2007. ( online  ( page no longer available , search in web archives )  Info: The link was automatically marked as defective. Please check the link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. , Accessed on March 10, 2008)@1@ 2Template: Toter Link / www.wiesbadener-kurier.de  
  5. ↑ a b c d Lydia Harder: A master in being popular. In: Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung . December 12, 2010, accessed September 18, 2014 . No disciplinary proceedings were initiated by the education authority (statement by Riegel on their homepage )
  6. ↑ Naked pictures in teachers' estate: identity of children unclear. In: Frankfurter Rundschau . December 13, 2010, accessed September 18, 2014 .
  7. ↑ Riegel im Wiesbadener Kurier on March 11, 2010. According to the newspaper report, the parents spoke out against an advertisement in order to protect their children from testifying in court
  8. ↑ Lydia Harder, loc. cit., p. 4, The five boys don't remember being asked how they are
  9. ↑ a b Helene Lange School: "We made mistakes". In: Frankfurter Rundschau . January 11, 2011, accessed September 18, 2014 .
  10. ↑ Patrick Körber Enja Riegel comments on cases of abuse at the Helene Lange School in Wiesbaden ( memento from March 14, 2010 in the Internet Archive ), Wiesbadener Kurier, March 11, 2010