The “Students to the Country” Initiative

Freiburg students organized the “Student to the Country” campaign in 1965, in the spirit of the student protests and as a measure against the “educational state of emergency” (Bildungsnotstand), a slogan for criticism of the educational system in the mid 1960s. The complaints included “overcrowded lecture halls and poorly equipped universities”¹ as well as “insufficiently equipped schools, a lack of teachers, and poor teacher training.”² The fact that hardly any working-class and female school students pursued an academic education was another source of resentment, as was the uneven distribution of educational opportunities between the urban and rural population, which was also reflected in a disparity between Catholic and Protestant regions.³

It was not enough for the Freiburg students to demonstrate with pithy slogans on banners for better educational opportunities of children from farming and working-class families, only two to five percent of whom were enrolled at a university at the time. The young women and men wanted to start at the grassroots level – so they went out into the villages and communities of South Baden from Lahr to Lörrach. They organized lecture evenings in which they tried to convince an audience of parents, teachers, and politicians to make it possible for the next generation to attend a secondary school.⁴ The dedication was great: “By mid-March 1965, one hundred and twenty student speakers and drivers who had refused to take any renumeration aside from reimbursement for their direct expenses had driven forty thousand kilometers and held lectures in front of around eighteen thousand people in four hundred rural districts.”⁵