However, after East Asia’s vibrant get-ahead approach to everything, I found Germany’s schools had become stuck in a time-warp circa the 1960s - some would even say the 1920s. Education policy-makers had not even begun to pay lip service to lifelong learning, thinking skills, creativity or any of those familiar buzzwords. And there was barely a computer in sight, even in secondary schools. Only in language learning does Germany score high marks. But that has more to do with Britain’s failings than Germany’s strengths.

Five years ago, Germans were astonished when I hinted that all was not well in the classroom. Many of the industrial jobs for which youngsters were training had already moved to China and Indonesia. And even the grammar-school pupils, used to rote learning, seemed ill-prepared for the knowledge economy.

So it was with considerable schadenfreude that I observed the angst, nay, agony, of ordinary Germans when the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development’s Pisa study, released last year, showed that among industrialised countries, German 15- year-olds ranked way below average in thinking skills and the application of knowledge.

The “Pisa schock”, as the press call it, has been reverberating for months. It has entered common parlance as shorthand for everything that is wrong with Germany’s education. Now, as I prepare to leave, the country is at last waking up.

Even Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder acknowledged that countries performing better than Germany in the Pisa study had all reformed their education systems while Germany had stood still. Mr Schroeder wants to drag his country forward, but is hamstrung by the federal system which gives responsibility for education to the states. Now even the states know they cannot stand still.

In Germany, aspirations have changed, and so has the economy. But education has not.

Apprenticeships for butchers and bakers go begging as young people queue for courses in theatre arts or for auditions for Germany’s version of Pop Idol.

As the 21st century dawned, the powerful guilds dating back to the Middle Ages had not approved a single information technology vocational course.

Those lucky enough to secure coveted industrial apprenticeships have no guarantee of being taken on permanently - less than 40 per cent of youngsters in the depressed east secure a job on completing their apprenticeship. They cannot change tack - even waitressing requires qualifications (and an apprenticeship) before you can earn an adult wage. Lengthy vocational training does not respond to a rapidly changing labour market where flexibility is the key.

Hans Olaf Henkel, president of the German Association for Industry, said the country needed to import computer specialists and other scientists. He was one of the first - as late as 2000 - to blame the shortage of scientists on the country’s outdated science education.

The once-admired engineering degrees are nowadays known more for their length rather than their cutting-edge know-how. Mohammed Atta was able to prepare for his hijacking of one of the planes that hit the World Trade Centre while registered for eight years as a student at Hamburg Technical University. It aroused no suspicions because eight years is nothing unusual in Germany.

As my children leave Berlin, I hope that one day they will return. But if nothing changes, Germany will have little to offer them in 15 or 20 years time.

Unless the row over Pisa translates into real reform, the mismatch between skills and available jobs will not be reversed. As other countries realised years ago, there could be much worse “schocks” to come. Then it will be too late to turn back the clock.

Yojana Sharma is a foreign correspondent for The TES