Luisa Neubauer
Text by a climate activist is the basis of a high school exam – Union politicians complain about it
Climate activist Luisa Neubauer in front of a Fridays for future banner (archive image)
© Stefan Zeitz / Imago Images
In the subject of politics, students from Lower Saxony had to deal with a text by Luisa Neubauer in their Abitur examination this year. A member of the state parliament then publicly criticized the task.
Some of the students must have been quite astonished: In this year’s political high school in Lower Saxony, a text by the climate activist Luisa Neubauer was to be worked on. Her essay entitled “Just because the right people govern doesn’t mean that the government is right”, which was published by “Zeit Online” last year, formed the basis for the content-related discussion of the questions that had to be answered.
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Following the Abitur exam, after it became known who had written the original text, Christian Fühner, member of the Lower Saxony state parliament, spoke up and criticized the fact that the words of a climate activist were chosen for this year’s political Abitur.
Luisa Neubauer’s opinion on the “tense relationship between the economy and the environment” was queried
As the “Bild” newspaper quotes from Luisa Neubauer’s Instagram story – which has since expired – the students were asked, among other things, to work out Neubauer’s view of the “tense relationship between the economy and the environment”.
The “Bild” newspaper then asked Fühner, spokesman for education policy for the CDU parliamentary group, what he thought of it. “I was quite amazed that the text by an activist was chosen,” he replied.
He is particularly bothered by the fact that the selection of the task – which he believes could have been made personally by the Lower Saxony Green Minister Julia Willie Hamburg – was not politically neutral, since she could have specifically selected Neubauer’s text, because Neubauer is now known to be a member of the Greens. “As the CDU parliamentary group, we will ask whether Ms. Hamburg had a direct or indirect influence on the selection of the test. And why a text by climate activist and Greens member Neubauer was chosen,” Fühner summarized his criticism.
Now the CDU parliamentary group wants to “ask about the assessment standard for the exams”, because Fühner personally “received many messages from concerned teachers and students” who wondered whether they were threatened with a bad assessment if they disagreed with Neubauer’s opinion in the processing of the exams Abitur task would not have connected. CSU General Secretary Martin Huber also criticized the selection: “Essays by activists are not high school material,” tweeted the Bavarian politician.