Hey! German history professor here. While I was barely 3 years old when the Wall fell, my brother who is 10 years my senior went to school in the former West Germany, so he has a decent amount of knowledge about their school system, which more or less mirrors the current German one. The East German education system was very different from the West German one, but neither my brother nor I have sufficient knowledge about it since we’re Wessis. If any East German wants to share his experience with East German schooling, it would be much appreciated. I’ll refer to West Germany as WG and East Germany as EG for brevity’s sake. Here goes:

Let’s start off by explaining how each education system worked. In WG, pupils were distributed into different types of schools from an early age based on their academic abilities, while EG made it mandatory for all pupils to attend comprehensive school until they reached 16 years of age. I’ll proceed to zero in on the WG system, because once again, I know a lot more about it.

In WG, the educational system was overall very rigorous. Much more rigorous than it is now, that’s for certain. The free market economy made for less social mobility i.e. children often ended up doing their parents’ professions or at least something similar to them. WG made it so that in order to complete an Abitur, you essentially had to be a straight A student, which in turn put less academically capable people in tougher situations later in life because they were unable to attain a premium level of education. In a way, this meant that even though WG had freedom, you’d end up “stranded” in life were you not to use that freedom properly for whatever reason, even if it wasn’t your fault at all.

In EG, there was what we call “positive discrimination”. In layman’s terms, this meant that due to the country’s communist method of government, children of working class people were favored in education. Upon completing comprehensive school, most pupils would enter the workforce and enroll in a job training program, while a small number of especially talented ones were able to continue secondary education and eventually attend university. From what I hear, these universities were very demanding and harsh and made the WG ones look like child’s play. This is what happened:

Now we get to the unification itself. I don’t need to explain to you how it sent shockwaves through every facet of German life. When the country underwent unification, many EG people had trouble acclimating themselves to the new way of life. Unemployment spread like wildfire, depression was also common especially among those who had spent their whole lives in EG, and many young people from EG failed to continue their education due to various factors. When it comes to schooling, all EG schools adopted the WG system practically overnight and many classes like political education were also dropped immediately. Sunday schooling stopped altogether, kids started bringing Western snacks, toys and technology to school. Some teachers failed to show up for class for weeks and even months on end sometimes. Communist songs and chants stopped being sung before every class, old maps showing our country split in two were taken down and replaced with the modern ones seen today. Any and all communist symbols which could be taken down, were. It seems that pupils from EG resumed their education from where they left off after some time. It was a tough period, you had to accustom millions of people to life in an entirely new country and system.

Unfortunately, I’m not able to answer your questions when it comes to high school and technical school students, but it can be said with certainty that whoever wished to continue their education, could.

If I made any mistakes, anybody can feel free to correct me. Modern history is not my strong suit, I specialize in Roman and early medieval matters.