Where do the children play?

Reading the US 8-12 year olds' stats made me flinch, because as someone grow up in the middle east this is inconceivable. I guess I'll dive into rabbit hole about modern-day stats of Europe and other places to compare.

Same phone addiction in Europe as elsewhere. No way to fight addictive stuff. Most parents don’t even try or care. Add tragic demographics and 8-12 year olds are all alone with their phones.

Let’s talk about special school system here in Bavaria (Germany). Kids from specific area go to same school for the first 4 grades. Afterwards they are divided between little geniuses going into „Gymnsasium“, average ones going to „Realschule“ and good-for-nothings going to „Mittelschule“. For the first years kids move between schools and later between classes according their preferred specialization. No way to make friendships when kids come and go. Obviously there is nobody to play with left. Only reliable phone and games there. And nice videos there. Education system actively pushes kids into phones since real connections can’t happen.

I see lots of negativity here. Folks, do you really believe, that throwing a child into new environment every other year is the way to craft friendships in the real world?

The founders of the Miniaturwunderland Hamburg were in the media describing how they push back against smartphones and media in their family life: https://www.ardmediathek.de/video/ndr-talk-show/miniatur-wun...

Strange coincidence: shortly after they were hacked https://www.borncity.com/blog/2025/11/12/miniatur-wunderland...

agreed. the whole system is bonkers and screams of elitism. like you are either born smart or you'll never make it. fortunately there is also gesamtschule. which does away with that, there is no distinction between levels. only your grades have to be good enough by grade 10 to make it into the oberstufe (yrs 11-13).

i barely made it through, and i would not have made it without that because neither my parents nor me had any ambitions, so switching schools would not have worked for me.

when i was younger we moved around a lot. different problem but same result, i didn't make any friends in school because we kept witching schools. by the time we stayed in one location it was already to late.

> Afterwards they are divided between little geniuses going into „Gymnsasium“, average ones going to „Realschule“ and good-for-nothings going to „Mittelschule“.

I would totally land in Realschule because I had an educational slump in fourth grade.

Over here they tried a similar system - middle school spanning classes 7-9 inclusively, named "Gymnsasium" as well, but it included everyone[0] and I recall having a similar sentiment, thinking: "why shove people around like that? So that we don't form lasting friendships and thus make better worker drones?"

Ironically I'm still in touch weekly with the three guys who were my only friends at the time, even though we live in different cities now.

[0] The split between college material and the rest only happened around high school.

The other side of the coin is that you have ambitious kids in a class who are distracted and sometimes even bullied by kids with zero ambitions.

You think that's more fair to the ambitious kids when 2/3 of the class think it's cool to NOT learn anything and playing pecking order games all day?

Your scenario paints an overly negative picture. Neither do the majority of the kids move between schools every year, nor do they switch up classes within a school every year. They usually stay with the same class 2-3 years and only switch for individual courses for a couple of hours per week.

You can criticize the way how kids are separated into different levels by 5th grade, but this has nothing to do with being able to find friends.

Furthermore, your argument doesn't make much sense, because the school system is like this way before smartphones even existed and kids were able to find friends back then. It's not like the school system forces them into escapism. Just that smartphones are simply addictive.

>like you are either born smart or you'll never make it.

That is a bit dramatic. This topic has been talked about over and over. There is no perfect system. Treat everyone the same and high potential kids suffer. Split them up by ability and you get "unfairness" criticisms.

The scenario is shit. I know. I don’t paint it pink. But it is as it is today somewhere between Munich and Alps. The today’s challenge is the demographics. The kids are rare. Retirees live in the majority of houses around us. The few kids of the street were divided between 3 school types in 4 different locations. They meet occasionally, but friendships were lost. There are simply no other kids around to go out together. Some parents are really desperate to organize (paid!!!!) play dates.

I am not scientist of society dynamics, but I don’t see any positive aspects of Bavarian school system. Producing lots of factory workers from “Real-“ and “Mittelschule”? Last factories are disappearing. Early separation of kids and continuous shuffling bewteen classes brings no positive effects for kids. Can a 10 year old boy have any idea what he wants to do in 15 years?.. Can a 10 year old boy know his strengths and weaknesses? I really doubt it. Sometimes I think Bavarian school system was CIA psyop after WW2 to cripple German society development. No close friends, no bonds in the society.

Every morning I see dozens of kids sitting (this week in unpleasant cold) on pavement or standing somewhere in the rain with their smartphones on the way to school. No phones in/around school building! It’s a plague and doesn’t look normal at all for me. I would expect some regulations from government regarding this insanity. There are phone-watches and dumb phones to reach kids if really needed. It must be profitable to someone to hook kids like that. Weirdest poses in rain, cold just to have quality time with their smartphones. I want scream when I see this every day. In most discussions with adults I end up as a luddite, because I don’t support technology. In my times modern technology was messing with autoexec.bat and we learned something from that for later.

that's not the other side of the coin. that's the other end of the extreme. there are other solutions that can accommodate both needs. the problem with splitting up schools is that kids are not always ambitions and faster, nor always slower or lazy. that changes over time. a better system needs to have the flexibility to adjust for kids as they are developing and growing. switching schools back and forth is the worst way to achieve that. i'd rather find extracurriula activities that keep the kids interested than force them to switch schools. the problem is teacher training and an inflexible education system. the ability to switch schools does not make the system any more flexible.

a better school lets you choose a more or less academic focus if that is what the kids want.

the best system btw is montesori where kids really can learn at their own pace. it is designed in such a way that even within a class different kids work on different projects. they even mix ages so that younger ambitious kids can work with older ones.

the unfairness criticism is nonsense. it's just politics. and it doesn't even apply here because the existence of different school types would be unfair as well. splitting kids up by ability is not unfair. forcing them in different schools however is. because switching schools takes a lot of effort and it gets harder the older you get simply because the curriculum diverges to much. so even if i am bored in a lower tier school, i could not catch up to a higher tier one. for most kids the moment the school tier is chosen after grade 4, the kid is stuck in that tier, no matter how able the kid turns out to be.

merging school types is not about treating everyone the same, but it is about acknowledging that kids develop and you can't evaluate the ability of a child based on their performance at age 9.

as i said, i would not have made it in a tiered system because i would have been stuck in the lowest tier. my parents were to busy to argue with each other to even care and my performance suffered because of them.

those are circumstances a tiered system can't handle. a merged system that can deal with children at all levels however can, and that made the difference for me. that has nothing to do with treating all kids the same. on the contrary, it has everything to do with treating kids individually and not stuffing them in boxes like a tiered system does.

as for a perfect system, montessori gets pretty close. three years of age are grouped together in one class. that alone require that the kids in that class are not all treated the same. it allows all kids to learn at their own pace, so younger, faster kids can easily catch up to older kids and work with them or be given extra activities without disturbing other kids in the same class learning something else

I agree on the needed flexibility part.

> the best system btw is montesori

I disagree on that. See a recent HN discussion on Montessori: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45674002

tl;dr: it works for some kids, just like the current German system works for some (other) kids.

you may notice that i took an active part in that discussion.

tl;dr: montessori really does work for almost all kids, not just for some. the cases in the discussion where montessori didn't work don't provide any evidence that they actually received real montessori education as the name "montessori" is not protected.

All the levels of education at my high school happened in the same buildings. There were people in my graduating class of 86 people that I never said ten words to in six years in the same school. I was never in the same classes and didn’t live near them.

Which is to say that tracking of any kind is going to end up with this, whether they are separate physical schools or separate curricula within one school.

i get your point, but i have a different experience. i also believe you are missing that once you made friends, switching tracks will only make it slightly more difficult to keep in touch. i didn't make many friends in school, but the friends i did make were not limited to my class and track. i can still see them during breaks, and we still share the same routes to and from school, ad we may still participate in the same extracurricular activities or clubs. those things would not change when switching tracks.

separate physical schools however may mean that i may never see some of these friends ever again. different school routes (even if we live in the same neighborhood). no chance to meet in breaks, etc. that's a whole different world.