Selection and Reform in West German Education

In most countries of the world, renewed consideration has been given recently to the dilemma of providing educational opportunity to the greates number of children while maintaining standards of excellence, especially in secondary and higher schools for the more academically able. Although the attention given to one or the other of these goals depends on what educators and the general public believe has been the imbalance in the particular system, neither objective can be dismissed as unimportant, and educators taking an extreme mass or elitist position do so at their own professional peril.