Building land in the middle of nowhere with the house prices?!

_if_ they want to change something for themselves.

If they don't want that, you can only partly blame them. I once had the chance to accompany my former potential mother-in-law for a day; she was a teacher at a special needs school. Even in a rural area. She told me how hard it is to motivate these children. And she is truly one of the warmest and most loving women I have ever met. But she says that many of the children come from a social environment where no one has gotten very far. You can't encourage a child with the promises that having a stable life offers because they can't relate to the concept. She once gave the example, "if you have a nice job later, you can go on a nice vacation." Normal children could understand that, but her protégés had never been on a vacation in their entire lives. They neither know what that is nor think they are missing anything. For them, what they know is normal. They basically start life with the ingrained certainty that everything is rubbish and will remain rubbish. :(

If they don't want that, you can only blame them to a limited extent. I once had the chance to accompany my former future mother-in-law for a day; she was a teacher at a special needs school. Even in a rural area. She told me how hard it is to motivate these children. And she is truly one of the kindest and most loving women I have ever met. But she says that many of the children come from a social environment where no one has made much of themselves. You can't encourage a child with the temptations offered by having a stable life because they can't grasp the concept. She once gave the example, "if you have a nice job later, you can go on holiday." Normal children could understand that, but her protégés had never been on vacation in their entire lives. They neither know what that is nor think they are missing anything. For them, what they know is normal. They practically start life with the ingrained certainty that everything is crap and everything will remain crap. :(

Or, referring to the last sentence: to consider crap as normal and not as something one should want to avoid. We have the hope that extracurricular activities achieve what does not happen in class. When kids see a zoo for the first time, go to the cinema for the first time, follow a plant from seed to bloom for the first time, the first time... extendable as desired. Then, for some, a window opens that is always closed in their families. That might then possibly whet their appetite where otherwise none would exist. But to put this into perspective: this is not true even for the majority of children at our location; it hasn’t come that far yet.

Your optimism is all well and good ... but there are children for whom ambition doesn't help much either. Those who have to learn German in first grade, don't speak German in private life, and only know the TV and Playstation at home instead of books, simply have a vastly worse starting position.

I don't want to generalize. My entire circle of friends and acquaintances were children just like the ones you described.

I don't know your family background. But maybe, despite the illiteracy of the guardians, there was a caring household in which education itself had some value. Apart from that, today's time with the digital pacifier machine for all the trials of the parent-child relationship is no longer comparable to back then.

I think that would go beyond the scope, it's already off-topic anyway. Just briefly: my siblings and I and my entire circle of friends grew up exactly like that back then, with Atari and Nintendo, with a family distant from education and uninterested in education, and today we are where people 30 years ago certainly wouldn't have seen us, because they had exactly the kind of thoughts as some users here.

The thing with the German language is a problem, yes.

I studied together with a kid whose father I later had the chance to listen to as a professor of electrical engineering at the university of applied sciences.
To this day, I find it hard to believe that someone can have a prof. as a father and be so unmotivated and dumb. If I recall correctly, in the end, he wasn’t even taken on for 1 year because he had a 4 on the exam.

Another prof. where I had a lot of lectures was a Hauptschüler. He had worked his way up step by step from the very bottom to the (very) top.

It’s possible. But you have to do more than the others and, of course, also be correspondingly intelligent. That, even if you don’t like to hear it, is inherited to a not insignificant extent or shaped by the family environment.

And the childless can stay out of this, because unfortunately, they have no idea. That’s how it is. Because even we, as double earners, me in field service, house building, etc., often have little time for the children...

Just briefly: my siblings and I and my entire circle of friends, who grew up exactly the same way back then, with Atari and Nintendo, with a family distant from education and not interested in education, are today where people certainly would not have seen us 30 years ago because they had exactly such ways of thinking as some users here.

I think that’s good.

Why do you think you did so well despite the "bad start"? What did you orient yourselves to, what motivated you?

We are a village, and the children who fall behind in school are the ones we have already debated about in the kindergarten board, either expelling due to missing contributions or grudgingly keeping. This ensures that there is structure, regular meals, and someone keeping an eye on the children. Cooperation with the youth welfare office has often taken place or is ongoing.