With the introduction of the compulsory eight-year primary school in 1946, the GDR’s education policy successfully replaced the traditional elementary school (Volksschule). In the next step, the SED leadership sought to raise compulsory schooling to secondary level in the context of establishing the foundations of socialism. To achieve this goal quickly, despite public irritation over the extension of compulsory schooling to ten years and some reservations about the participation of minors in productive work, the SED leadership took preparatory steps and legislative processing into its own hands. The School Act of 1959 (Schulgesetz, 1959) designated the ten-year general secondary school as the future of compulsory school. In the 1970s, the polytechnical secondary school (Polytechnische Oberschule, POS) was considered to have been established. In 1988/89, 90.4 percent of pupils had already successfully completed it.

As early as 1958, the SED leadership had also decreed that polytechnical education should include a day of practical training in production and technology instruction - albeit without sufficient conceptual preparation. The fact that Marx considered this area of education to be inevitable after the working class seized power, in order to understand the basic forms of human productive activity (produktives Tun) and to prepare for the necessary availability of the fully developed producer in a future industrial working world, provided sufficient legitimation. In addition, the subject had been reintroduced in the Soviet Union shortly before with a slightly different emphasis and after two decades of non-existence. In the GDR, polytechnical instruction included school gardening (grades 1-4) and craft instruction (grades 1-6). In grades 7-10, there were 4-5 hours per week of introduction to socialist production (Einführung in die Sozialistische Produktion), technical drawing (Technisches Zeichnen) and a day of instruction in socialist production or, from the 1970s onwards, the productive work of the pupils. As a rule, theoretical instruction and practical work in pupil workshops (especially in grade 7) and then, if possible, in the immediate operational production of agriculture or industry alternated every 14 days. At the same time, polytechnicality was conceived as a principle of general education. The polytechnical subjects, together with mathematical and scientific education, comprised around half of the entire curriculum.