In the educational policy and pedagogical self-image of the GDR, the term unified schooling refers to a structurally consistent education system from kindergarten to university, which was based on uniform content and ideological principles and laid down in the various laws on schools and education of 1946, 1959 and 1965. This was considered a prerequisite for achieving a basic general education that was the same for all in compulsory school, with the goal of developing comprehensively and harmoniously developed socialist personalities.

Access to higher education in the GDR was determined by academic performance, skills, talents, and social, political and economic criteria, with varying degrees of emphasis and sometimes with serious consequences. The term unified schooling, derived from the tradition of progressive bourgeois educational efforts, testified to the will to insist on uniformity in the content of lessons, for example, without consideration for the individuality of the pupils, and to ignore the school logic of creating difference. Complex practical, and above all, social and economic effects of such an enforced principle of uniformity were largely ignored. The result was the enforcement of uniformity to the detriment of the promotion of talents, individual inclinations and educational interests, accompanied by reluctant educational policy concessions to economic necessities, for example in the form of so-called special schools or optional instruction. In the second half of the GDR's existence, the relationship between uniformity and differentiation was discussed and didactic conclusions were drawn from this in the form of so-called internal differentiation.