Industry, towns with more than twenty thousand inhabitants are
empowered to make their own rules compelling commercial employees
under eighteen to attend the continuation schools a certain number of
hours monthly, and fining employers who interfere with such
attendance. It has even been suggested that this law be extended to
include girls.
In Berlin this has already been put into operation, and
this year some 30,000 girls will be compelled to attend continuation
schools, where they will be taught cooking, dress-making, laundry
work, house-keeping economy, and for those who wish it, office work.
It will require some training even to pronounce the name of this new
institution, which requires something more than the number of letters
in the alphabet to spell it, for it has this terrifying title:
Maedchenpflicht-fortbildungsschule.
The work in these Pflichtfortbildungsschulen, or compulsory
continuation schools, is practical and thorough. The boys are from
fourteen to eighteen years of age, and are obliged to attend three
hours twice a week. Shopkeepers and others, employing lads coming
under the provisions of the law, are obliged by threat of heavy fines
to send them. The boys pay nothing. There are some 34,000 of such
pupils under one jurisdiction in Berlin, and the cost to the city is
$300,000 annually. The curriculum includes letter-writing, book-
keeping, exchange, bank-credits, checks and bills, the duty of the
business man to his home, to the city, and to his fellow business men,
his legal rights and duties, and, in great detail, all questions of
citizenship. Methods of the banks, stock exchange, and insurance
companies are explained. The business man's relations in detail to the
post-office, the railways, the customs, canals, shipping agencies are
dealt with. The investigation of credits and the general management
from cellar to attic of what we call a "store" are taught, and
lectures are given upon business ethics and family relations and
morals.
In towns where factories are more common than shops there are
schools similar in kind, as at Dortmund, for example, where you may
begin with horse-shoeing in the cellar, and go up through the work of
carpenter, mason, plumber, sign-painter, poster-designer, to the
designing of stained-glass windows and the modelling of animals and
men.
In the strictly agricultural districts of Prussia the number of
courses open to those who work upon the land has steadily increased.
In 1882 there were 559 courses of instruction and 9,228 pupils; in
1902, 1,421 such courses and 20,666 pupils; and in 1908, 3,781 courses
and 55,889 pupils. About five per cent. of the cost of such
instruction, which cost the state 566,599 marks in 1908, is paid by
the fees of the pupils themselves.
To those interested in ways and
means it may serve a purpose to say that the total cost of these
elementary schools amounts to $130,715,250 a year, of which the
various state governments pay $37,500,000 and local authorities the
rest. In 1910 the city of Berlin spent $9,881,987 on its schools. The
average cost per pupil is $13.50. In some of the towns of different
classes of population that I have visited the number of pupils per 100
inhabitants stands as follows: Berlin, 11.1; Essen, 16.5; Dortmund,
16; Duesseldorf, 13.2; Charlottenburg, 9; Duisburg, 16.7; Oberhausen,
17.7; Bielefeld, 14.7; Bonn, 11.1; Cologne, 13.1.
There are 170,000
teachers in these elementary schools, of whom 30,000 are women. They
begin with $250 a year, which is raised to $300 when they are given a
fixed position. By a graduated scale of increase a teacher at the age
of forty-eight (when he may retire) may receive a maximum of $725. A
woman teacher's salary would vary from $300 to $600 as the maximum.
These figures are for Prussia. In other states of the empire, in
Bavaria and Saxony, for example, the scale of salaries is somewhat
higher.
The secondary schools are the well-known Gymnasien and
Progymnasien, the Realgymnasien, and the Realschulen. Roughly the
Gymnasien prepare for the universities, and the Realschulen for the
technical schools. Admission to the universities and to any form of
employment under the civil service demands a certificate from one or
another of these secondary schools.
In 1890, two years after the
present Emperor came to the throne, he called together a conference of
teachers and in an able speech suggested that these secondary schools
devote more time and attention to technical training. As a result of
this, the certificates of the Realgymnasien and Realschulen are now
received as equivalent to those conferred by the Gymnasien, where
Latin and Greek are, as they were then, still paramount.
Of these
secondary schools some are state schools; others are municipal or
trade-supported schools; some are private institutions; but all are
amenable to the rules, organization, and curricula approved by the
state. All secondary and elementary teachers must meet the
examinational requirements of the state, which fixes a minimum salary
and contributes thereto. In the universities and technical high-
schools all professors are appointed by the state, and largely paid by
the state as well. In the year 1910 the German Empire expended under
the general heading of elementary instruction $130,715,250. Prussia
alone spent $60,424,325; Bavaria, $8,955,825 (though nearly $750,000
of this total went for building and repairs for both churches and
schools); Baden, $4,176,075; Saxony, $4,573,250; the free city of
Hamburg, $5,561,900. The total expenditures of the empire and of the
states of the empire combined in 1910 amounted to $2,225,225,000; of
this, as we have seen, more than $130,000,000 went for instruction and
allied uses; $198,748,775 was the cost of the army; and $82,362,650
the cost of the navy, not counting the extraordinary expenditures for
these two arms of the service, which amounted to $5,624,775 for the
army, and $28,183,125 for the navy. The total expenditure of the
Fatherland for schools, army, and navy amounted, therefore, to one-
fifth of the total, or $416,108,225.
I have grouped these expenditures
together for the reason, that I am still one of those who remain
distrustful and disdainful of the Carnegie holy water, and a firm
believer that the two best schools in Germany, or anywhere else where
they are as well conducted as there, are the army and the navy. Even
if they were not schools of war, they would be an inestimable loss to
the country were they no longer in existence as manhood-training
schools. This is the more clear when it is remembered that, according
to the army standard, both the German peasant and the urban dweller
are steadily deteriorating. In ten years the percentage of physically
efficient men in the rural districts decreased from 60.5 to 58.2 per
cent., and this decrease is even more marked in particular provinces.
Infant mortality, despite better hygienic conditions and more
education, has not decreased, and in some districts has increased;
while the birth-rate, especially in Prussia and Thuringia, has fallen
off as well. For the whole of Germany, the births to every thousand of
the inhabitants were, in 1876, 42.63; in 1891, 38.25; in 1905, 34; and
in 1909, 31.91. In Berlin the births per thousand in 1907 were 24.63
and in 1911 only 20.84.
The observer who cares nothing for statistics,
who rambles about in the district of Leipsic, Chemnitz, Riesa,
Oschatz, and in the mountainous district of southeast Saxony, may see
for himself a population lacking in size, vigor, and health,
noticeably so indeed. Education at one end turning out an unwholesome,
"white-collared, black-coated proletariat," as the Socialists call
them; and industry and commerce, which even tempt the farmer to sell
what he should keep to eat, at the other, are making serious inroads
upon the health and well-being of the population.
The Chancellor, von
Bethmann-Hollweg, speaking in the Reichstag February 11, 1911, said:
"The fear that we may not be working along the right lines in the
education of our youth is a cause of great anxiety to many people in
Germany. We shall not solve this problem by shunning it!"
Many social
economists hold that higher education is unfitting numbers of young
men from following the humbler pursuits, while at the same time it is
not making them as efficient as are their ambitions; and such men are
recognized as the most potent chemical in making the milk of human
kindness to turn sour. At a meeting of the Goethebund this year,
advocating school reform, it was evident that many intelligent men in
Germany were not satisfied with present methods of education, which
were characterized as wasting energy in mechanical methods of
teaching, and so robbing youth of its youth. It is beginning to be
understood in Germany, as it has been understood by wise men in all
ages, that "to spend too much time in studies is sloth; to use them
too much for ornament is affectation; to make judgment wholly by their
rules is the humour of the scholar." This commentary of Bacon should
be on the walls of every school and university in Germany. An
education can do nothing more for a man than to make him less fearful
of what he does not know, and to save him from the vulgarity of being
pre-empted wholly by the present, because he knows something of the
past. You cannot educate a man to be a poet or a preacher or a
pianist; that we know. We are only just discovering that the much-lauded
technical education will not make him an engineer or a
shipbuilder or an architect. You may give him the tools and the
elementary rules, but the rest he must do himself. Nine-tenths of the
technically educated men to-day are working for men who were liberally
educated, or who educated themselves. Germany is producing a race of
first-rate clerks and skilled mechanics, who are working hard to
enrich the Jews.
In America, it is true, we have gone ahead along
educational lines. In 1800, it is said, the average adult American had
82 days of school attendance; in 1900, 146 days. In the last quarter
of a century our secondary schools have increased in number from 1,400
to 12,000; and during the last eighteen years the proportion of our
youth receiving high-school instruction has doubled, and attendance at
American colleges has increased 400 per cent. while the population
increased by 100 per cent. But education is by no means so strenuous
as in Germany. The hours are shorter, holidays longer, standards
lower, and the emphasis far less insistent. A boy who has not the
mental energy to pass the entrance examinations at Harvard, for
instance, and proceed to a degree there, ought to be drowned, or to
drown himself. I would not say as much of the requirements in Germany,
for they are far more severe. Prince von Hohenlohe in his memoirs
gives an account of a conversation between the Emperor, the Emperor's
tutor, and himself. The Emperor was regretting the severity of the
examinations in the secondary schools, and it was replied to him that
this was the only way to prevent a flood of candidates for the civil
service!
There is another all-important factor in Germany bearing upon
this point. A boy must have passed into the upper section of the class
before the last, "Secunda," as it is called, or have passed an
equivalent examination, in order to serve one year instead of three in
the army. To be an Einjaehriger is, therefore, in a way the mark of an
educated gentleman. The tales of suicide and despair of school-boys in
Germany are, alas, too many of them true; and it is to be remembered
that not to reach a certain standard here means that a man's way is
barred from the army and navy, civil service, diplomatic or consular
service, from social life, in short. The uneducated man of position in
Germany does not exist, cannot exist. This is, therefore, no phantom,
but a real terror. The man of twenty-five who has not won an education
and a degree faces a blank wall barring his entrance anywhere; and
even when, weaponed with the necessary academic passport, he is
permitted to enter, he meets with an appalling competition, which has
peopled Germany with educated inefficients who must work for next to
nothing, and who keep down the level of the earnings of the rest
because there is an army of candidates for every vacant position. On
the other hand, the industries of Germany have bounded ahead, because
the army of chemists and physicists of patience, training, and
ability, who work for small salaries provide them with new and better
weapons than their rivals.
There are two sides to this question of
fine-tooth-comb education. Its advantages both America and England are
seeing every day in these stout rivals of ours; but its disadvantages
are not to be concealed, and are perhaps doing an undermining work
that will be more apparent in the future than now it is. The very fact
that an alien, an oriental race, the Jews, have taken so
disproportionate a share of the cream of German prosperity, and have
turned this technical prowess to purposes of their own, is, in and of
itself, a sure sign that there may be an educated proletariat working
slavishly for masters whom, with all their learning and all their
mental discipline, they cannot force to abdicate.
Strange to say, the
federal constitution of 1871, which gave Germany its emperor, did not
include the schools, and each state has its own school system, but in
1875 an imperial school commission was formed which has done much to
make the system of all the states uniform.
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.