Angie,

Last week, I wrote an email to my close friend Mr. Hiroshi Yamazaki in Japan on the changes I had read about Germany. As one of my occasional "Letters from Toronto" to our class home page, I titled it as "Germany Now and Then in Pictures".　Since you have lived in countries near Germany for so many years, I thought you might also be interested in what I have written about that country.
　
As you know, I always go to Bayview Village Library to take out French and German magazines, just for the sake of giving my brain some stimulation to endure the long and boring winter here.

In the first issue of January 2004, the weekly magazine "Der Spiegel" has a cover story about the philosopher Immanuel Kant. As you can see in Attachment 1, the cover picture quotes his saying: "The starry sky above me, and the moral codes within me."

Undoubtedly the Germans consider Kant's philosophy and Geothe's literature their most proud cultural heritage. Kant who lived all his life of 80 years in Koenigsberg was a great educater. The cover story was to commemorate the 200th anniversary of his death on February 12, 1804.

Two issues later in the same month, however, the magazine has a different cover story about education. The picture you see in Attachment 2 shows the front gate of a university looking more like a movie set. Behind it, we can see a dilapidated school building with cracked walls and wooden supports. We also see rebellious students running out of the gate totally naked.

　The cover says: "The dear Cheap-University. Is charging tuition the answer?" The story inside points out the more than doubling of student numbers in 14 years, and the more than one-third decline in State subsidies per capita. It says Germany's university education is on the verge of collapse due to overworked professors, mediocre research, frustrated students, rundown buildings in addition to the budget cuts from State.

From internet news, I have also learned that German high school kids are doing not so well, either. The OECD sponsored last year a test named PISA of 15-old students in some 50 countries, each taking 5,000 to 10,000 students, on math and science. Germany ranked lower than 20th. Japan was first in math and South Korea was first in science. Anyway, it means the Germanic people has certainly changed in the last 200 years since Kant! DAD