In Germany, when you finish primary school, your teachers give an advice on which school you can attend: Gymnasium, Realschule or Hamptschule, depending on how good they think you are.

First of all you don’t have to attend the school your teachers advised, you can still attend a Gymnasium if your teachers said you should go to a Hamptschule. So it’s significantly different from the selection criteria of that American high school.

Then this selection process is known to be biased against children of foreigners. Somebody said that without strict competition in high school admissions we wouldn’t have playstations and covid vaccines, so it’s useful to know that the founder and CEO of BioNTech (who is a Turk-German) was advised to go to a Hamptschule by his primary school teachers. So he wouldn’t have been able to attend university.

Said that, having a brother that works as a teacher in a Gymnasium, I insist that these kids are not learning anything esoteric or peculiarly complicated. If the average kid in an upper middle class neighbourhood returns an assignment with less than one typo per row, he would be remembered for years.