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Youth protest, sometimes accompanied by riots, in a number of
European countries over the last few years repeatedly trigger the question whether similar forms of protest can be expected in the near future from young people in Germany as well. While any, often spontaneous eruption of (violent) protest, can never be predicted with certainty, we argue, based on an analysis of the last Shell Youth Studies (cf. Shell Deutschland 2002, 2006, 2010), that it is rather unlikely to happen in Germany, indeed that if anything this likelihood has decreased over recent years. We identify three explanations for the – compared to a range of other European countries – striking acquiescence of the current young generation in Germany: 1. A range of institutions that keep young Germans in the education system until they finally find employment, 2. a strong culture of pragmatic individualism, and 3. a strong distrust of political parties.
Young women, and not young men, acquire the privileged diplomas offered by the educational system, and it is they who obtain the more promising career prospects. In this paper, we seek to identify factors that account for the declining school performance of boys and young men. After reviewing and analysing the international literature on gender and education, we integrate various explanatory approaches into a comprehensive socialisation model. The model focuses on the developmental tasks young men face during adolescence. Our central thesis is that the declining school performance of young men cannot be fully explained by their failure to cope with the developmental task ‘qualification’. Rather, the three other central clusters of developmental tasks – ‘social attachment’, ‘regeneration’, and ‘participation’ – have to be incorporated. The crucial implication is that supporting young men at school will show only limited results. Rather, to improve the school performance of young men, it is also necessary to address their deficits in coping with the other developmental tasks.