Hi and welcome to Ones and Twos, FP's economics podcast. Every week we take a couple data points, use them to try to explain the world. I'm Cameron Abadi, FP's deputy editor with you in Berlin, Germany. Joining us as always is FP's economics columnist and Columbia University professor Adam Tooze, this week in New York. Hi, Adam.
So, two segments for you all this week. In the second half of the show, we're going to be continuing our occasional series on various countries of the world. This week we'll be talking about Liechtenstein, the small Alpine country—very small Alpine country, I should say. So stick around to hear about that. But in the first half, we have another data point for you all, and that is 1.43 billion. That is the number of children, according to UNESCO's 2026 Global Education Monitoring Report, attending primary or secondary school in 2024 around the world. So we could figure generally a similar number will be attending school this year, and probably a large number of them are returning to school or have just returned to school. It is that season after summer. September in the United States tends to be the month that most people do return to school after Labor Day, the holiday in the United States. That is about one in six people on the planet probably going to a classroom.
For many people, that means doing various kinds of purchases ahead of time, whether it is specific kinds of lined paper or pens, pencils, but there are also distinctive purchases depending on where you are in the world. And we thought we'd dig into what exactly back-to-school purchases may mean depending on where exactly you are. And Adam, wanted to start off with the country where I am right now, in Germany. That comes to mind specifically because the most important purchase is probably one that happens before a child enters school properly. Specifically, there's a ceremony known as the Einschulung, which is the very first day that the child enters the school. And there is a requisite purchase that accompanies that ceremony: it is the Schultüte, as the Germans call it. The literal translation is "school cone," and it's a large cone made out of heavy kind of card stock, and it's filled with treats of various kinds and other school-related purchases. And the cone itself tends to be designed either by a manufacturer or, in our case, my wife and I designed them for our children based on things that they like, with various kinds of pictures. Adam, you've seen the Schultüten that we gave to each of our children in my home. And all of this raises, I think, a question, which is: this ceremony is, as far as I know, distinctive to Germany, and it seems to kind of highlight entering school as a very specific rite of passage, entering first grade most typically. And this purchase, I guess I wanted to ask whether it signals that in Germany entering school is a kind of more distinct transition than in other countries? Is there a specific understanding that Germans have of the institution of school that is different, and it's revealed in this Schultüte purchase?
Yeah, it was really fun to be there with your daughter this year on her first day at school. And I seem to remember we had a big discussion about Bert's actually as well, which was very soccer themed.
Maybe that was such a prized possession that it was still knocking around the house, Bert being quite a big boy now.
No, no, no. We've kept them.
Oh, I can see. Okay, I get it. Yeah, that's why it came out over pizza one evening.
Yeah, it's an extraordinary ritual. I think it's a sort of Central European ritual; I think Polish kids do it too. Historically, it seems to come out of the region of Saxony, actually. I mean, Saxony being like one of the hubs of cute kid toy small manufacturing of the 19th century. It's an early 19th-century tradition, apparently. And apparently, the idea was that kids were tempted, bribed into going to school by the promise that sort of at the basement of the school there was a sugar cone fairy tree-type thing which, if you were a good kid and you went to school, you would somehow get access to. And so the whole thing was set up a little bit like Father Christmas, where it wasn't actually the parents initially, apparently, which gave these out, but it was grandparents or guardians or godparents that would show up at the school with the prize Schultüte.
And I share your bemusement about it and exactly that psychological, that social-psychological rationalization. I'm very sensitive to this because I joined a German school when I was seven; I moved to Germany when I was six. And the shock for me was that by that point, I'd already been in school for three years, because English kids were sent at that point to school when they were four. In fact, the German school I went to was the fourth school I'd been to. So, not only had I been in school for my fourth year, but I'd been through a fairly tumultuous early childhood at school. And all of a sudden to encounter all these kids who are being, you know, carefully managed into school with their prized little things—and I'd been in like two North London schools and a slightly derelict American off-campus base school in the Vietnam era, and then, hey, we're going to go to our village school with a little bag of treats. My parents, I mean, they didn't see it coming. They had no clue, and I wasn't equipped. And so it was quite the beginning of a long and very profoundly surreal initiation into German education for me.
And I do think it has something to do with that. I mean, in West Germany in my day, I think it's changed a little bit, but a lot of kids would essentially go to school from a fresh start; they might not have been in kindergarten at seven. So it pointed to a really deep reluctance, really, to hand the kid over to the institution of school. The school was maybe three, four hours long. It was over by lunchtime. Kids were sent home randomly to their parents—that is, to their mothers—whenever the school wasn't providing a teacher, which the school would not announce ahead of time. There was no sense that the school was a total institution that your kid was joining into and was now going to be part of at almost the same level, if not even in some respects higher than the family, because public and institutionalized and so on. I think your instinct is exactly right that there's something about this—and you could say it was quite cozy, and Germany after all is one of the sources of cuteness and coziness in European culture in the 19th century, a kind of Biedermeier kind of feel, it seems to me, of the well-cosseted, well-looked-after child is now being sent to the school and so needs treats.
I think that's right. And you're putting your finger on that: that there is no expectation that until the point that a child is seven years old that they will have had been in any institution at all. And this is then the first sort of encounter with German Beamte, like these German civil servants who are the teachers in schools. And so this transition, I think, is typically thought of as a very stark one. And then there's a specific sentence that typically accompanies this transition that I've heard now repeatedly at these Einschulung ceremonies, usually from well-meaning relatives, but they always strike me as really almost harrowing, which is, "Der Ernst des Lebens beginnt"—so like, "Now the serious part of life begins," or something along those lines. Like, you're entering now an institution for the first time and childhood is maybe over in some form because now you're going to be molded by the state in some sense. Telling my six-year-old that now the serious part of life begins is such a stark description of what entering school would be. But that's Germany for you.
Of course, as I mentioned, every country is different when it comes to these things. And in some sense, the big typical purchases aren't for this kind of ceremony prior to school, but rather for the classroom itself. And it does strike me that there may be kinds of different things expressed in those purchases. Just sort of two contrasting examples that came to mind: from what I know of Great Britain, it strikes me that there would be typically school uniforms purchased. I was reading statistics about what percentage of kids wear uniforms in Britain, and I was surprised to see that it's well over 90%, at least by some estimates. And then in the United States, there are also purchases of clothing, typically in many school settings, but sometimes in the United States that comes in the form of school merchandise. And these contrasting purchases, I guess in one sense, maybe in Britain a uniform might express an emphasis on institutional conformity, and in the United States, this kind of merchandise almost as an expression of branding, almost building a kind of identity around the school and some sort of personal or group identity through those purchases. So I'm curious what those contrasts might strike you in that sense.
Yeah. Again, my childhood back and forth between England and Germany really rubbed in that point. Sorry, this is also autobiographical, but I spent my first couple of years in English schools, one of which—the private one—required a uniform, and then the state school one didn't. And that was part of a sort of trend, I think, in many British state schools in the '70s in the age when they were introducing American-style comprehensives. So, no division by academic strength and performance, but a single comprehensive school. I think the emphasis on uniforms declined. It remained very strong in the more traditional private schools, in the more selective so-called grammar schools, which were academically selective like Gymnasiums in Germany.
But now there's been a big push. It's now official government ministerial policy that schools in Britain should have uniforms. And it's absolutely about the sense of corporate identity, of separating the kids from family life, from street life, to create a kind of corporate identity. And coming to this from say a German setting, it was completely mind-bogglingly alien that that could be the concept of what a school is, right? That it's literally something that demands identification of that type, rather than being this weird encounter that you have as a basically private individual with a public institution which you then navigate on the basis of rights and rules and regulations. And our German teachers would formally ask us whether it was okay to use the "Du" form to kids, because they might then anticipate that we would use the "Du" form back to them—a scene unimaginable in any British secondary school where the teacher of course is referred to as "Sir" or "Miss," and the kids are quite often referred to by their surnames, at least they are in private schools, or at least they were.
So, very different culture, and a hugely political issue in Britain because of the costs involved, right? So schools can ramp up the costs of membership. And Britain right now is in a phase of deep preoccupation with social inequality around these kinds of issues, so there's a big politics around the estimated costs of required state school uniform, which are non-trivial: £200, so that's about $300, something like that. But by comparison with America, of course, it's peanuts, because the estimated spending on the return to school in the United States is macroeconomic. I mean, it's $43 billion for K-12, so basically school, and $103 billion for associated spending of college kids. So truly, that's like work creation stimulus numbers. A lot of that will no doubt have to do also with fees of various types, but this is a huge market.
And again, for someone coming from a European culture, at least prior to the full Americanization of pop culture, which happens I think really not until the '90s and the 2000s, 2010s, the idea that anyone who was associated with a college or a school would willingly spend money to buy a sweatshirt that had the name of the school on it would just have struck you as truly out of your mind. Like, why on earth would you do that? Whereas of course in the United States, it's absolutely de rigueur. The letterman jacket of the sports dudes in college and in high school is endlessly circulated. So a very deep difference that's associated, I think you're absolutely right, you put your finger on something. And it makes a huge difference also to teaching at an institution like this, because in the United States there is an embrace, in many cases at least in the institutions I've been privileged to teach at, of the fact that you're there and that it means something, and it means something positive, and you're proud of it.
And the language around this is surreal. Americans, there is a market for, I kid you not, "spirit wear." Spirit wear is the fancy term for merch, and merch is the term for the college-branded, school-branded outfit which every kid in an American high school or college probably needs at least some item of, right? Otherwise, you're really labeling yourself as outside the mainstream—incomprehensible to a European, I think.
Yeah, in some ways, I mean, you mentioned the sort of conformist logic of the school uniform in Britain, but in some ways it's more profound in the United States because it's almost an internalized conformity, right? This is—
A big southern football school stadium on a big game day, and what comes to mind, after all?
Yeah, exactly. There's no mandated uniform, but that makes it all the more profound.
"Do we want total victory? Yes, we want total victory."
I would say then the other virtue, I guess, of the school uniform in Britain that sometimes I hear cited in the United States is that it has a kind of leveling effect as well. So like all these back-to-school purchases you're describing in the United States, what that also reveals are different class markers, right? And so having a uniform that covers those up where everyone has to wear the same thing is probably not an unuseful thing to have.
But there are other very distinctive purchases made in certain countries, and one thing that came to mind here in Germany, but not only in Germany, it turns out, are very distinctive backpacks. And it turns out there's a connection here between Germany and Japan. I had not known about this, but there is a very specific type of backpack that German children are expected to wear, and it seems to quite resemble the one that Japanese children also wear. And the words for them are also relatively similar, it struck me: the German word is Ranzen; the Japanese word, and apologies in advance if I'm mangling the pronunciation, is randoseru. And both of these are kind of very bulky kinds of backpacks with some various internal structure that gives it a shape. It also turns out these backpacks are extraordinarily expensive. I think as an American, I was flabbergasted that German parents are expected to spend around several hundred euros on a backpack for their kids, and yet that is an entirely normal purchase that parents make.
And I'm curious about this tradition, whether these are just kind of random path-dependent cultures that have grown in these countries and economies, obviously, that have grown around them as well that are probably substantial given how expensive they are, or is there something to these backpacks that we should all be learning from? Is there a kind of technical advancement expressed in these backpacks that other countries could benefit from?
Yeah, it's a truly fascinating story, and it has to do with the history of utility wear. Horrifyingly, in the US context today, it might be referred to as tactical, because it has military origins. In other words, who were the people who first needed organized, effective mechanisms for carrying weights on their backs, camping equipment, and so on? Obviously, it was military. And it's really the early 19th-century militaries which begin to develop in a systematic way uniforms which are suitable for mobility, essentially. And it's out of those traditions, and actually it's German-Dutch, that the Japanese borrowing came, which was of a purpose-made backpack which was suitable for carrying heavy loads of books.
And apparently this model was taken up in the late 19th century in Japan quite enthusiastically and became absolutely de rigueur in 1887 when a crown prince of the Japanese royal family went to school wearing one of these European-style, Dutch-style backpacks. Its name is various. The way you pronounced it may be like a Berlin shortened version, because I grew up with Ranzen, with an "n" on the end. The borrowing from the Dutch is ransel. These Germanic languages of the Lower Rhine region have these kinds of variations. The Japanese pick up on it, and this was basically the military-style backpack generally made out of canvas, heavy canvas or leather, through to the 1960s when synthetic materials begin to come into widespread use.
And astonishingly, because again I literally lived this experience, apparently in the 1960s an Austrian mountaineering equipment family came up with a revolutionized design. It's the Essl family—you can buy their bags all the way down to the present day—which came up with a revolutionized design which was portrait rather than landscape, so it concentrates the weight down the spine. It has properly padded straps, and it has an internal skeleton made of light hard plastic and a pad for your back so that when the weight presses, it's well-supported on the back. And these are the key elements of the—I'm going to say it—iconic German Ranzen of the 1970s, which was the Scout Ranzen, which I think was introduced broadly in Germany in the mid-1970s. '74, '75 is when I remember, because by the time I was halfway through German elementary school, there was nothing in the world I wanted more than a Scout Ranzen. They were absolutely the hit.
I remember them already then being very expensive; I gather now they're like up to €200, €250, which is insane for German school spending, as German schools generally don't expect that much spending. And they are optimized carrying equipment. In the history of hiking equipment, the '70s and '80s were a period of quite rapid innovation in camping in terms of tents which have these sprung structures which hold the tent much more securely, Gore-Tex breathable materials, and much-improved backpacks. And the German Ranzen, the Japanese version—for anyone who wants to visualize this, just imagine a cute team of Japanese kids going to school and the backpack that you're thinking that they have on their back, which is this square, highly colorful, strangely modernist object, that's a Ranzen. That's this 50-year-old now technology that improved. It's a really fascinating thing.
I was wondering in my mind whether it emerges in the same moment as the wheelie, the ultimate Airbnb harbinger, the little wheels, whether there was a kind of wave of gadgets in this period which just improved these basic elements of life. But the Ranzen, the new synthetic carrying device, is a non-trivial innovation for lots of young people around the world. Apparently, 10 million Scouts have been sold in Germany.
Oh goodness, wow. I wonder whether there's a market for these backpacks elsewhere. It sounds like the kind of thing that one could imagine becoming a status object in the United States. I guess it's a business idea for someone if they're interested. But yeah, I would not underestimate how big an economy it's become here in Germany. One is expected now in some cases where kids go, they get measured for these backpacks. That's its own rite of passage now, like there are stores where it's as if they're getting a kind of custom-made suit or something.
I guess to end this particular segment, I wanted to ask about the intersection of back-to-school purchases and another topic that often comes up on the podcast, namely climate change and climate adaptation, specifically because it struck me that a lot of school purchases are expressions of climate adaptation already. In Scandinavia, it turns out that there's all sorts of standard outdoor clothing that kids are expected to buy at the beginning of the year because they spend so much time outdoors there and it gets so cold. So there's all sorts of distinctive clothing for school kids. In Australia, it turns out that the distinctive purchase are school hats to protect from the sun. And so I wonder whether we should expect new school traditions along these lines and what those might be. What do you think, Adam?
Yeah, I love this question because it brings out something that's very dear to me as a person who works in education, which is it's a seasonal line of work. I sometimes joke that it's like farming or peasant work: we cultivate the crop, we harvest in the early summer. I really love this aspect of my working life, that it has such a pronounced seasonal rhythm. But of course, the premise of that is the seasons remain the same and the underlying structure of nature retains its order. And we're clearly in a world right now where that's no longer true.
There was always a kind of contrast between the regulations of school uniforms and the natural climate. I will never forget a very cold winter, an unusually cold winter in London in the early '70s where the school uniform required us to go to school through snow—which I remember going up to my calves—in shorts, because the school uniform was shorts. It was one of those jarring, "Is this completely crazy?" Or yes, that is exactly what we're expected to do. Apparently in the UK, there have been highly imaginative school protests in which boys who were previously required to wear regulation long trousers in the early summer in intensely hot conditions that you sometimes now get in the southeast of England, in protest adopted the girls' school uniform and all wore skirts to go to school until the school adjusted the rules, which strikes me as a highly provocative and fascinating kind of response.
There are going to have to be adjustments to this mechanism, right? Or the alternative, which is really large-scale air conditioning. And this is something that actually shows up in economic data because one of the most pernicious forms of discrimination within the American education system is which public schools have proper cooling and which don't. And notably in the underfunded school systems of some of the southern states, which get intensely hot and humid from a very short spring and by April, May it's already becoming very, very difficult to function inside, many of those are not properly air-conditioned, with correspondingly terrible consequences for kids' learning capacity and the ability of people to teach. So this question of education and climate is a really important one. And yes, uniforms are clearly going to have to adjust.
It reminds me that in Berlin and Germany, I guess more broadly, it's very unusual for schools to be closed for snow, in contrast with places in the United States. I've seen Washington, DC, I think, is really quick to close when there's snow. But essentially no schools are equipped with air conditioning, and so increasingly it's typical to have what's called Hitzefrei. They just cannot keep the schools open as summer begins or in the late part of summer as we are in now, and so kids will just be sent home because it's too hot in the schools.
Anticipating that, we literally would go to school in bathing costumes.
