Education in Gianatla (Pacifica)

Education in GI-Land

Ministry for Education
Minister	Dr. Thomas Rampnitz
General details
Primary languages	German
System type	Central
Literacy (2018)
Total	99%
Male	99%
Female	99%

Education in GI-Land is highly centralised. It is divided into three stages:

1. primary education, consisting of Kindergarten and Grundschule (primary school)
2. secondary education, consisting of Gymnasium (grammar school), Realschule (real school) and Mittelschule (middle school). Students normally only visit one of these school types.
3. tertiary education, consisting of the possibilities to go to university, college or serve an apprenticeship.

There is also a school type called Sonderschule (special school), in which students that have a disadvantage due to disabilities get provided their right on education. There are regular debates to abolish special schools and instead work for better inclusion of such students.

Education in GI-Land is provided for by the state tuition-free. Home-schooling is not allowed, the government reasoning, that the child's right to a complete education is above the right of the parents to withhold certain information to their offspring.

Primary Education

Playgroups and optional Kindergarten

GI-Land offers education for one year old children already. Kids can meet up in a Krabbelgruppe (playgroup), where they meet other children for the first time, make music and train their motor skills through games with their parents. As of two years old, children may join a kindergarten, where they usually get supervised between 7:00 h and 13:00 h while playing games, making music, crafting, interacting with the friends they make and often going on little field trips in order to gain a first understanding of the world that is surrounding them.

While the Ministry of Education recommends parents to let their children visit a playgroup and kindergarten before they are five years old, it was not made mandatory. This results in playgroups and kindergartens charging parents a yearly fee of on average around 180 Tacks ($200). However subsidies for low-income families are existing, but they strongly vary between each federal state.

Mandatory year in Kindergarten

When five years old a child has to go to kindergarten. As a preparation for primary school, children learn to count to 20, write their name (and sometimes address) and maybe even read their first little children's books. This happens in a friendly, playful environment with specially trained nursery school teachers. This mandatory year of kindergarten exists mainly to make sure the educational level of all children is the same when joining primary school independent of their origin, class, income or gender. All kids will get tested by a public medical officer by the end of the kindergarten year on whether they are ready to join primary school or still need to get held back for another year in nursery school.

A fine gets imposed on parents not applying their child for a spot in kindergarten when it gets four years old. The fine is around 180 and 1,000 Tacks ($200-1,100), depending on the family's income. Parents can prevent such a fine by proving their child is not ready for nursery school yet. The proof is normally a doctor's note by a public medical officer attesting the inability of a child to visit nursery school. In all circumstances a child can only get held back for not longer than one year from visiting nursery school or getting promoted to primary school. This means the latest age a child can join nursery school is 6 and the latest age a child can get promoted to primary school is 8.

Primary School

The primary school in GI-Land covers six years in which children are taught basic social skills, and the knowledge and competences needed for secondary education. The children will normally get put into one class, which will stay together until the end of primary school. This shall help building up strong bonds to their classmates. Another concept used to achieve that goal, especially between 1st and 4th grade, is to form "group tables". Two tables are put together, so a group of four children can sit at "one table".

Each lesson starts and ends with an acoustic signal, e.g. with a bell, that's audible throughout the entire school building. A normal lesson takes 45 minutes, but many schools moved to the "block system", where one lesson takes 90 minutes and the teacher can decide together with the students on when to have a five minute break inside that lesson. The advantage of this being, to maintain a certain workflow for the teacher and the students and to place a pause depending on the intensity of the lesson rather than just based on time. Between the 2nd and 3rd, and the 4th and 5th lesson there is a 20 minute break. Keeping that in mind a normal day of school normally extends from 8:00 A.M. until between 11:20 A.M. and 1:10 P.M., depending on the child's grade. Many primary schools offer a Hort (after school care center) after school, where the children can stay until up to 4 P.M., where they are playing with their classmates or doing their homework.

Depending on the school year, the children have a different amount of weekly lessons in school:

1st/2nd grade:	21
3rd/4th grade:	25
5th/6th grade:	30

The lessons cover the following subjects:

Subject	Classes	Hours per Week	Notes
German	1-6	6 (1st-4th grade) 5 (5th-6th grade)
Maths	1-6	6 (1st-4th grade) 5 (5th-6th grade)
General Studies	1-4	3	Covers topics related to daily life, e.g. "How do seasons work?" or "How does wheat become bread?"
Arts	1-6	2	Often divided into 1/2 year of art for tinkering and drawing and 1/2 year of music
Sports	1-6	2	Playful athletic activity to learn teamwork, strengthen the bonds between the children, improve motor skills and in some schools learning self-defense
Project Groups	1-4	2	Project groups are extracurricular activities like a sports club, a club to learn an instrument or, as of 3rd grade, to study Atlantic. Atlantic courses are mostly provided in Atlantis and Greater GI-Land and can also get taken by 5th and 6th grade students.
Austral	3-6	4
GPG	5-6	3	History, Politics and Geography. Replacement for General Studies.
Science	5-6	3	Physics and Biology. Replacement for "General Studies".
Ethics	5-6	3	Replacement for "General Studies"

At the end of a school year, the children get a report from their teacher. The report describes, what the child has learnt, how developed its social and motor skills are and how it performed in the individual subjects. The latter gets shown with marks ranging from 1 (A) to 6 (F). There's an additional report after 1/2 of a school year in 6th grade. That half-year-report is the basis, that decides what types of secondary school the student has qualified and thus can apply for.