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The Volkshochschule
Almost every town in Germany has a Volkshochschule, or VHS, a publicly supported adult-education center. There are around 850 of them, and together they offer hundreds of thousands of courses a year: languages, including German and integration courses for newcomers, computer skills, cooking, yoga, painting, history, politics and creative writing. Courses usually meet one evening a week for a semester and cost much less than private classes. The tradition goes back to the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when the idea was to make education available to people who had left school early, and the Weimar constitution of 1919 explicitly called for it to be supported. Today the VHS is still one of the main places where adults keep learning after school or work. For many people, a VHS course is also a social occasion: a way to meet neighbors, make friends in a new city, or try something they have always wanted to do. Course catalogs come out twice a year, and popular classes can fill up within days of registration opening.