Christian Meyer, Dr. Gerhard Weil - Conflicts in school:
Head covers, sport instruction, swimming lessons, sexual education, class travels and the legal background
1. Introduction
In the last twenty years in German schools conflicts with Muslim, predominantly Turkish pupils and parents, abounded, because of the compulsory participation in the sport -, swimming and sexual education, from nonparticipation in class excursions and from carrying the head cover. Disregarding the fact that due to more rigid regulations in the laicist tradition line of Kemal Atatuerk these problems do not exist in Turkey and swimming lessons are unusual due to scarcity of swimming pools, the attitude of Muslim parents definitely manifests a religious self-confidence, surely promoted by fundamentalists, but in addition, hardened outside of these circles, which in an (allegedly?) Christian shaped environment uses to the full the fundamental democratic rights of the religious manifestation, the freedom of religion and confession in accordance with article 4 of the Constitution. Since the fundamental rights are binding also for "non-citizens", national instances such as instructors, head masters, school councils and administrations had again and again to go through the "painful" learning process, which has since under multi-cultural aspects changed many a self-evident fact in a German school or made it at least appear in another light. When one summarizes the results of a twenty-year-old development one must state right away that only in these outlined conflict fields, under the pressure by "merciless" judicial rulings, interculturality was brought into the German school, unfortunately exclusively in domains, which are also represented or shaped by representatives or groups, that in relation to general Islamic conditions can be termed extremely religious, if not fundamentalist. Thus recruiting for a intercultural education according to the KMK recommendation of 1996, gets often opposed with hints at the not always rationally convincing measures as "forced upon" by the "German side”. From the point of view of the intercultural education a father suing in court for the reading of Nazim Hikmet, Yasar Kemal or Aziz Nesin during the normal instruction in German schools would undoubtedly be much more pleasure. But for the time being this must still be done by decisive teachers, university teachers or school principals without any court assistance.
If one regards the development of judicial rulings, then the shyness of school administrators, who otherwise regulate the tiniest detail in the Lands of the Federal Republic, to step in with administrative regulations becomes clear. They shirk from using rules and other regulations such as circular letters to confront Islamic oriented parents with levels of the legal contention and the need to change regulations by judicial rulings. In Berlin one can state that except for the letter from 1981 by the former school senator Rasch sent to the district offices regarding head covers no normative regulations exist, bar the one in the minutes of a conference of school supervision from the year 1982, where the (legally noncommittal) attitude of the school supervision body was specified regarding the conflict fields mentioned These minutes will be discussed in detail later.
The Berlin line is thus to offer Muslim parents as little reason to complain as possible, i.e. to avoid any judicial rulings. That becomes clear for example of a penalty case in the Administrative Court Berlin, where a Turkish father forced his daughter to miss the sexual education, because pictures showing naked people were shown there. A pre-trial agreement has been reached to avoid controversy and the judgement!
I did the introduction with babelfish and some manual correction. The rest:
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