Chapter 17

The three classes of schools recognized as leading later to a university career are the Gymnasium, in which Latin and Greek are still the fundamental requirements; the Realgymnasium, in which Latin but no Greek is required; the Oberrealschule, in which the classics are not taught at all, but emphasis is laid upon modern languages and natural science. In addition to these there are the so-called Reformschulen, of very recent growth, which are an attempt to put less emphasis upon the classics, but without excluding them entirely from the course, and to pay more attention proportionately to modern languages, French in particular. There are in addition some four hundred public and one thousand or more private higher girls' schools, with an attendance of a quarter of a million, all subject to state supervision.

If one were to make a genealogical tree of the German schools which educate the children from the age of six up to the age of entrance to the university, it might be described as follows: First are the Volkschulen, which every child must attend from six to fourteen. In the smaller country schools the children of all ages may be in one school-room and under one teacher; in another, divided into two classes; in another, into three or four classes; up to the large city schools, in which they are divided on account of their number into as many as eight classes. Next would come the Mittelschulen, where the pupils are carried on a year farther, and where the last year corresponds to the first year of the so-called Lehrerbildungsanstalten, or training schools for teachers. These again are divided into two, one called Praeparanda, the other Seminar, the former carrying the pupil on to his sixteenth year, the latter to the nineteenth year and turning him out a full-fledged Volkschule teacher, and giving him the right to serve only one year in the army.

If boy or girl goes on from the fourteenth year, the hoehere Knabenschulen and the hoehere Maedchenschulen take them on to the eighteenth or nineteenth year. Many boys go on till they have passed from the lower Secunda, next to the last class, which is divided into upper and lower Secunda, into the upper Secunda, when their certificate entitles them to serve one year only in the army, when they quit school. Many boys, too, intending to become officers, leave school at sixteen or seventeen and go to regular cramming institutions, where they do their work more quickly and devote themselves to the special subjects required. For boys intending to go on through the higher schools, there are schools taking them on from the age of nine, with a curriculum better adapted than that of the Volkschulen to that end.

In all these higher schools there is less attention paid to mere examinations, and more attention paid to the general grip the pupils have on the work in hand; and of the teaching, as mentioned elsewhere, too much cannot be said in its praise.

For those boys who finish their public schooling at the age of fourteen and then turn to earning their living, there are the continuation schools, which are in many parts of the country compulsory, and which are nicely adapted, according to their situation in shopkeeping cities, in factory towns, or in the country, to give the pupils the drilling and instruction necessary for their particular employment. The average amount of expenditure for these continuation schools is $6,250,000. In Prussia there are some 1,500 of these schools, with an average attendance of 300,000 pupils.

According to the last census the proportion of illiterates among the recruits for the army was 0.02 per cent. The number of those who could neither read nor write in Germany was, in 1836, 41.44 per cent.; in 1909, 0.01 per cent. If one were to name all the agricultural schools; technical schools; schools of architecture and building; commercial schools, for textile, wood, metal, and ceramic industries; art schools; schools for naval architecture and engineering and navigation; and the public music schools, it would be seen that it is no exaggeration to speak of fine-tooth-comb education.

I have visited scores of all sorts of schools all over Germany, from a peasant common school in Posen up to that last touch in education, the schools in Charlottenburg, the Schulpforta Academy, and such a private boys' school as Die Schuelerheim-Kolonie des Arndt-Gymnasiums in the Gruenewald near Berlin, and the training schools for the military cadets. Through the courtesy of the authorities I was permitted, when I wished it, to sit in the class-rooms, and even to put questions to the boys and girls in the classes. From the small boys and girls making their first efforts at spelling to the young woman of seventeen who translated a paragraph of the "Germania" of Tacitus, not into German but into French, for me (a problem I offered as a good test of whether I was merely assisting at a prepared exhibition of the prowess of the class or whether the minds had been trained to independence), I have looked over a wide field of teaching and learning in Germany. If that young person was typical of the pupils of this upper girls' school, there is no doubt of their ability to meet an intellectual emergency of that kind.

Of one feature of German education one can write without reservation, and that is the teaching. Everywhere it is good, often superlatively good, and half a dozen times I have listened to the teaching of a class in history, in Latin, in German literature, in French literature, where it was a treat to be a listener. I remember in particular a class in physical geography, another reading Ovid, another reading Shakespeare, and another reading Goethe's "Hermann and Dorothea," where I enjoyed my half-hour, as though I had been listening to a distinguished lecturer on his darling subject.

We know how little these men and women teachers are paid, but there is such a flood of intellectual output in Germany that the competition is ferocious in these callings, and the schools can pick and choose only from those who have borne the severest tests with the greatest success. The teaching is so good that it explains in part the amount of work these poor children are enabled to get through. School begins at seven in summer, at eight in winter. The course for those intending to go to the university is nine years; the recitation hours alone range from twenty-five to thirty-two hours a week; to which must be added two hours a week of singing and three hours a week of gymnastics, and this for forty-two weeks in the year. The preparation for class-work requires from two and a half to four hours more. It foots up to something like fifty hours a week!

At Eton, in England, the boys grumble because they only have a half-holiday every other day, and four months of the year vacation. It will be interesting to see which educational method is to produce the men who are to win the next Waterloo. No wonder that nearly seventy per cent. of those who reach the standard required of those who need serve only one year instead of three in the army are near-sighted, and that more than forty-five per cent. are put on one side as physically unfit. The increase in population in Germany is so great, however, and the candidates for the army so numerous, that the authorities are far more strict in those they accept than in France, for example. There is more manhood material for the German army and navy every year than is needed.

In the first year of the nine-years' course in a Gymnasium the 25 hours a week are divided: religion, 3 hours; German, 4 hours; Latin, 8 hours; geography, 2 hours; mathematics, 4 hours; natural science, 2 hours; writing, 2 hours. In the last year: religion, 2 hours; German, 3 hours; Latin, 7 hours; Greek, 6 hours -- Greek is begun in the fourth year; French, 3 hours -- French is begun in the third year; history, 3 hours; mathematics, 4 hours; natural science, 2 hours.

In the first year in a Realgymnasium: religion, 3 hours; German, 4 hours; Latin, 8 hours; geography, 2 hours; mathematics, 4 hours; natural science, 2 hours; writing, 2 hours. In the last year of the course: religion, 2 hours; German, 3 hours; Latin, 4 hours; French -- begun in third year -- 4 hours; English -- begun in fourth year -- 3 hours; mathematics, 5 hours; natural science, 5 hours; drawing, 2 hours.

In the first year in an Oberrealschule: religion, 3 hours; German, 5 hours; French, 6 hours; geography, 2 hours; mathematics, 5 hours; natural science, 2 hours; writing, 2 hours. In the last year: religion, 2 hours; German, 4 hours; French, 4 hours; English -- begun in the fourth year -- 4 hours; history, 3 hours; geography, 1 hour; mathematics, 5 hours; natural science, 6 hours; free-hand drawing -- begun in the second year -- 2 hours.

It may be seen from these schedules where the emphasis is laid in each of these schools. So far as results are concerned, the pupils about to leave for the universities seemed to me to know their Latin, Greek, French, German, and English, and their local and European history well. Their knowledge of Latin and of either French or English, sometimes of both, is far superior to anything required of a student entering any college or university in America. I have asked many pupils to read passages at sight in Latin, French and English in schools in various parts of Germany and there is no question of the grip they have upon what they have been taught. I am, alas, not a scholar, and can only judge of the requirements and of the training and its results in subjects where I am at home; and I must take it for granted that these boys and girls are as well trained in other subjects where I am incapable of passing judgment. It is improbable, however, that the same thoroughness does not characterize their work throughout the whole curriculum. The examination at the end of the secondary-school period, called Abiturienten-examen, is more thorough and covers a wider range than any similar examination in America. It is a test of intellectual maturity. It permits no gaps, covers a wide ground, leaves no subject dropped on the way, and sends a man or woman to the university, with an equipment entirely adequate for such special work as the individual proposes to undertake.

It seemed to me that in many class-rooms the ventilation was distinctly bad, but here too I must admit an exaggerated love for fresh air, born of my own love of out-door exercise.

There are practically no schools in Germany like the public schools for boys in England, and our own private schools for boys, like Saint Paul's, Groton, Saint Mark's, and others, where the training of character and physique are emphasized. Here again I admit my prejudice in favor of such education. I should be made pulp, indeed, did I try to run through the boys of a fifth or sixth form at home, but, from the look of them, I would have undertaken it for a wager in Germany.

It is not their fault, poor boys. Practically the whole emphasis is laid upon drilling the mind. Moral and physical matters are left to the home, and in the home there are no fathers and brothers interested in games or sport, and in this busy, competitive strife, and with the small means at the disposal of the majority, there is no time and no opportunity. Boys and girls seldom leave home for distant boarding-schools. They go from home to school and from school home every day, and have none of the advantages to be gained from intercourse with men outside their own circles. It shows itself in a deplorable lack of orientation as compared with our lads of the same relative standing. In dress and bearing, in at-homeness in the world, in ability to take care of themselves under strange conditions or in an emergency, and in domestic hygiene they are inferior, and yet they are so competent to push the national military, industrial, and commercial ball along as men, that one wonders whether Bagehot's gibe at certain well-to-do classes of the Saxons, that "they spend half their time washing their whole persons," may not have a grain of truth in it.

Another feature of the school life which is prominent, especially in Prussia, is the incessant and insistent emphasis laid upon patriotism. In every school, almost in every class-room, is a picture of the Emperor; in many, pictures also of his father and grandfather. Even in a municipal lodging-house, where I found some tiny waifs and strays being taught, there were pictures of the sovereign, and brightly colored pictures of the war of 1870-71, generally with German personalities on horseback, and the French as prisoners with bandages and dishevelled clothing. This war, which began with the first movement of the German army on August 4, and on the 2d of September next Napoleon was a prisoner; this war, in which the German army at the beginning of operations consisted of 384,000 officers and men and which had grown during the truce to 630,000 on March 1; lost in killed and those who died from wounds 28,278, of whom 1,871 were officers; this war is flaunted at the population of Germany continually, and from every possible angle. We hear very little of our war of 1861-1865, that cost us $8,000,000,000 with killed and wounded numbering some 700,000. We do not find it necessary to feed our patriotism with a nursing-bottle.

At a kindergarten two tots, a boy and a girl, stood at the top of some steps while the rest marched by and saluted; they later descended and went through the motions of reviewing the others. They were playing they were Kaiser and Kaiserin!

Two small boys in a school-yard discussing their relative prowess as jumpers end the discussion when one says as a final word: "Oh, I can jump as high as the Kaiser!"

We have noted in another article how even police sergeants must be familiar with the history of the House of Hohenzollern.

I am an admirer of Germany and her Emperor, with a distinct love of discipline and a bias in favor of military training, and with an experience of actual warfare such as only a score or so of German officers of my generation have had; but I am bound to say I found this pounding in of patriotism on every side distinctly nauseating. Boys and girls, and men and women, ought not to need to be pestered with patriotism. We had a controversy in America some ten years before the Franco-German War, where in one battle more men were killed and wounded than in all the battles Prussia, and later Germany, has fought since 1860.

In the South, at any rate, we bear the scars and the mourning of those days still, but nobody would be thanked for pummelling us with patriotism. In the skirmish with Spain our military authorities were pestered with candidates for the front. Germany itself is not more a nation in arms than America would be at the smallest threat of insult or aggression. But we take those things for granted. If we have the honor to possess a medal or a decoration, the gentlemen among us wear it only when asked to do so, or perhaps on the Fourth of July.

Germany is even now somewhat loosely cemented together. Their leaders may feel that it is necessary to keep ever in the minds even of the children, that Germany is a nation with an Emperor and a victory over France, France in political rags and patches at the time, behind them.

They even carry this teaching of patriotism beyond the boundaries of Germany. The Allgemeiner Deutscher Schulverein zur Erhaltung des Deutschtums im Auslande, is a society with headquarters in Berlin devoting itself to the advancement of German education all over the world. The society was started privately in 1886, and is now partly supported by the state. It controls some sixteen hundred centres for the teaching of German and German patriotism, and German learning. There are such centres in China, South America, the United States, Spain, and elsewhere. They number 90 in Europe, 25 in Asia, 20 in Africa, 70 in Brazil, 40 in Argentina, and 100 in Australia and Canada. The society is instrumental in having German taught in 5,000 schools and academies in the United States to 600,000 pupils. The work is not advertised, rather it is concealed so far as possible, but it is looked upon as a valuable force for the advancement of German interests throughout the world.

In the schools, too, there is an enemy of which we know nothing, and that is the active propagandism of socialism, which is anti-military, anti-monarchical, and anti-status quo. Leaflets and books and pamphlets are widely distributed among the school children; many of the teachers are in sympathy with these obstructionist methods; and the authorities may feel that they must do what they can to combat this teaching. In Prussia, on every side, and in the industrial towns of Saxony, one sees the evidence of this impotent discontent expressing itself either openly or in surly malice of speech and manner. The streets of Berlin, and of the industrial towns, show this condition at every turn, and when the Reichstag closes with cheers for the Emperor, the Socialist members leave in a body before that loyal ceremony takes place.

We in America are brought up to believe that the best cure for such maladies is to open the wound, to give freedom of speech, to let every boy and girl and man and woman find out for himself his citizen's path to walk in. We have no policemen on our public platforms, no gags in the mouths of our professors or preachers, no lurid pictures of battles, no plastering of the walls of our schools and seminaries with pictures of our rulers, and withal our German immigrants are perhaps our best and most patriotic citizens. In America they think less and do more, and for most men this is the better way. It makes life very complicated to think too much about it.

Self-consciousness is the prince of mental and social diseases, as vanity is the princess, and even self-conscious patriotism seems a little unwholesome, not quite manly, and often even grotesque. It is easy to say: "Dic mihi si fueris tu leo, qualis eris?" and if one is a person of no great importance, it is an embarrassing question to answer. In this connection I can only say that I should assume that my lionhood was taken for granted without so much roaring, bristling of the mane, and switching of the tail. It irritates those who are discontented, it positively infuriates the redder democrats, and it bores the children, and, worst of all, proclaims to everybody that the lion is not quite comfortable and at his ease. The German lion is a fine, big fellow now, with fangs, and teeth, and claws as serviceable as need be, and it only makes him appear undignified to be forever looking at himself in the looking-glass.

Whatever may be the right or wrong of these comparative methods of training, Germans trained in the investigation of such matters agree in telling me that the boys who come up to the universities, especially in the large cities and towns, are somewhat lax in their moral standards as regards matters upon which the puritan still lays great stress.

In Berlin particularly, where there are some thirty-five hundred registered and nearly fifty thousand unregistered women devoting themselves to the seemingly incompatible ends of rapidly accumulating gold while frantically pursuing pleasure, there is an amount of immorality unequalled in any capital in Europe. In the whole German Empire the average of illegitimacy is ten per cent. but in Berlin the average for the last few years is twenty per cent. Out of every five children born in Berlin each year one is illegitimate! It is questionable whether the increasing demands of the army and navy require such laxity of moral methods in providing therefor.

There is, however, a state church in Germany with its head in Berlin, and no doubt we may safely leave this matter in these better hands than ours. I beg to say that in mentioning this subject I am quoting unprejudiced scientific investigators, who, I may say, agree, without a dissenting voice of importance, that Berlin has become the classical problem along such lines. In the endeavor to compete with the gayeties elsewhere, a laxity has been encouraged and permitted that has won for Berlin in the last ten years, an unrivalled position as a purveyor of after-dark pleasures. Berlin not only produces a disproportionate number of such people as Diotrephes, in manners, but also a veritable horde of those who are like unto the son of Bosor.

After the sheltered home life and the severe discipline of the higher schools, a German youth is permitted a freedom unknown to us at the university. There is no record kept of how or where he spends his time. He matriculates at one or another of the universities, and for three, four, or, in the case of medical students, five years, he is free to work or not to work, as he pleases.

There are, however, three factors that serve as bit and reins to keep him in order. The final examination is severe, thorough, and cannot be passed successfully by mere cramming; very few of the students have incomes which permit of a great range of dissipation; and not to pass the examination is a terrible defeat in life, which cuts a man off from further progress and leaves him disgraced.

These are forces that count, and which prevail to keep all but the least serious within bounds. German life as a whole is so disciplined, so fitted together, so impossible to break into except through the recognized channels, that few men have the optimistic elasticity of mind and spirits, the demonic confidence in themselves, that overrides such considerations.

We in America suffer from a superabundance of men of aleatory dispositions, men who love to play cards with the devil, who rejoice to wager their future, their reputation, their lives, against the world. I admit a sneaking fondness for them. They are a great asset, and a new country needs them, but if we have too many, Germany has too few. They are forever crying out in Germany for another Bismarck. Whenever in political matters, in foreign affairs, even in their religious controversies, things go wrong, men lift their hands and eyes to heaven and say, "How different if Bismarck were here!" Bismarck and two of his predecessors as nation-builders were not afraid to throw dice with the world, and what "the land of damned professors" could not do, they did.

When the young men from the Gymnasium come into the freedom of university life, they toss their heads a bit, kick up their heels, laugh long and loud at the Philistine, but just as every German climax is incomplete without tears, so they too are soon singing: "Ich weiss nicht was soll es bedeuten dass ich so traurig bin!" the gloom of the Teutoburger Wald settles down on them, and they buckle to and work with an enduring patience such as few other men in the world display, and join the great army here who, bitted and harnessed, are pulling the Vaterland to the front.

The British Empire between 1800 and 1910 grew from 1,500,000 square miles to 11,450,000 square miles, and its trade from $400,000,000 to $11,020,000,000; not to mention the United States of America, now considered to be of noticeable importance, though we are universally sneered at by the Germans, to an extent that no American dreams of who has not lived among them, as a land of dollars, and, from the point of view of book-learning, dullards. But it is this, none the less, that Germany envies, and has set out to rival and if possible to surpass. No wonder the training must be severe for the athletes who propose to themselves such a task.

For a semester or two, perhaps for three, the German student gives himself up to the rollicking freedom of the corps student's life. That life is so completely misunderstood by the foreigner that it deserves a few words of explanation.