THE EDUCATION OF THE POOR
There are no people in the world who need driving to school less than
the Germans. There are no people in the world who set so high a value
on knowledge. In the old days, when they lived with Jove in the
clouds, they valued knowledge solely for its own sake, and did not
trouble much about its practical use in the world. It is absurd to
say, as people often do now, that this spirit is dead in the nation.
You cannot be long in the society of Germans without recognising that
it survives wherever the stress of modern life leaves room for it. You
see that when a German makes money his sons constantly enter the
learned and the artistic professions with his full approval, though
they are most unlikely to make a big income in this way. You are told
by people who work amongst the poor, that parents will make any
sacrifices year after year in order to send a boy to one of the higher
schools. You know that the Scotsmen who live on oatmeal while they
acquire learning have their counterparts in the German universities,
where many a student would not dine at all if private or organised
charity did not give him a dinner so many days a week. Sometimes you
have heard it said of such and such a great German, that he was so
poor when he was young that he had to accept these free dinners given
in every German university town to penniless students. The fact would
be remembered, but it would never count against a man in Germany. The
dollar is not almighty there.
To say, therefore, that education is compulsory throughout the empire
is not to say that it is unpopular. A teacher in an elementary school
was once telling me how particular the authorities were that every
child, even the poorest, should come to school properly clothed and
shod. "For instance," she said, "if a child comes to school in
house-shoes he is sent straight home again." "But do the parents mind
that?" I asked from my English point of view, for the teacher was
speaking of people who in England would live in slums and care little
whether their children were educated or not. But in Germany even the
poorest of the poor do care, and to refuse a child admission to school
is an effective punishment. At any rate, you may say this of the
majority. No doubt if school was not compulsory the dregs of the
nation would slip out of the net, especially in those parts of the
empire where the prevalent character is shiftless and easy going.
"When you English think that we hold the reins too tight, it is
because you do not understand what a mixed team we have to drive," a
north German said to me. "We should not get on, we should not hold
together long, if our rule was slack and our attention careless."
At the last census only one in 10,000 could not read or write, and
these dunces were all Slavs. But how even a Slav born under the eye of
the Eagle can remain illiterate is a mystery. In 1905 there were
59,348 elementary schools in the empire, and their organisation is as
elaborate and well planned as the organisation of the army. In Berlin
alone there are 280. All the teachers at these schools have been
trained to teach at special seminaries, and have passed State
examinations that qualify them for their work. In Germany many men and
women, entitled both by class and training to teach in the higher
grade schools, have taken up work in the elementary ones from choice.
I know one lady whose certificates qualify her to teach in a _Höhere
Töchterschule_ and who elects to teach a large class of backward
children in a _Volkschule_. Her ambition is to teach those children
described in Germany as _nicht völlig normal_: children we should
describe as "wanting." She says that her backward children repay her
for any extra trouble they give by their affection and gratitude. She
knows the circumstances of every child in her class, and where there
is real need she can get help from official sources or from
philanthropic organisations, because a teacher's recommendation
carries great weight in Germany. This lady gets up every day in summer
at a quarter past five, in order to be in school by seven. Her school
hours are from seven to eleven in summer, and from eight till twelve
in winter; but she has a great deal of work to prepare and correct
after school. Her salary is raised with every year of service, and
when she is past work she will be entitled to a State pension of
thirty pounds.
Children have to attend school from the age of six and to stay till
they are fourteen; and in their school years they are not allowed to
work at a trade without permission. They do not learn foreign
languages, but they are thoroughly grounded in German, and they
receive religious instruction. Of course, they learn history,
geography, and arithmetic. In the new schools every child is obliged
to have a warm bath every week, but it is not part of a teacher's
duties to superintend it. Probably the women who clean the school
buildings do so. In the old schools, where there are no bathrooms,
the children are given tickets for the public bathing establishments.
The State does not supply free food, but there are philanthropic
societies that supply those children who need it with a breakfast of
bread and milk in winter. Everyone connected with German schools says
that no child would apply for this if his parents were not destitute,
and one teacher told me a story of the headmaster's boy being found,
to his father's horror and indignation, seated with the starving
children and sharing their free lunch. He had brought his own lunch
with him, but it was his first week at school, and he thought that a
dispensation of bread and milk in the middle of the morning was part
of the curriculum.
School books are supplied to children too poor to buy them, and it
seems that no trouble is given by applications for this kind of relief
by people not entitled to it. Gymnastics are compulsory for both boys
and girls in the lower classes, and choral singing is taught in every
school. Teachers must all be qualified to accompany singing on the
violin. Most of the elementary schools in Prussia are free. Some few
charge sixpence a month. A child can even have free teaching in its
own home if it is able to receive instruction, but not to attend
school. Medical inspection is rigorously carried out in German
elementary schools. The doctor not only watches the general health of
the school, but he registers the height, weight, carriage, state of
nourishment, and vaccination marks of each child on admission; the
condition of the eyes and ears and any marked constitutional tendency
he can discover. Every child is examined once a month, when necessary
once a fortnight. In this way weak or wanting children are weeded out,
and removed to other surroundings, the short-sighted and the deaf are
given places in the schoolroom to suit them. The system protects the
child and helps the teacher, and has had the best results since it was
introduced into Prussia in 1888.
Attendance at continuation schools is now compulsory on boys and girls
for three years after leaving the elementary school, where they have
had eight years steady education. They must attend from four to six
hours weekly; instruction is free, and is given in the evening, when
the working day is over. Certain classes of the community are free,
but about 30,000 students attend these schools in Berlin. The subjects
taught are too many to enumerate. They comprise modern languages,
history, law, painting, music, mathematics, and various domestic arts,
such as ironing and cooking. More boys than girls attend these
schools, as girls are more easily exempt. It is presumably not
considered so necessary for them as for their brothers to continue
their education after the age of fourteen.
One of the most interesting experiments being made in Germany at
present is the "open air" school, established for sickly children
during the summer months. The first one was set up by the city of
Charlottenberg at the suggestion of their _Schulrat_ and their school
doctor, and it is now being imitated in other parts of Germany. From
Charlottenberg the electric cars take you right into the pine forest,
far beyond the last houses of the growing city. The soil here is loose
and sandy, and the air in summer so soft that it wants strength and
freshness. But as far out as this it is pure, and the medical men must
deem it healing, for they have set up three separate ventures close
together amongst the pine trees. One belongs to the Society of the Red
Cross, and here sick and consumptive women come with their children
for the day, and are waited on by the Red Cross sisters. We saw some
of them lying about on reclining chairs, and some, less sickly, were
playing croquet. The second establishment is for children who are not
able to do any lessons, children who have been weeded out by the
school doctor because they are backward and sickly. There are a
hundred and forty children in this school, and there is a crêche with
twenty beds attached to it for babies and very young children. One
airy room with two rows of neat beds was for rickety children.
The third and largest of the settlements was the _Waldschule_, open
every day, Sundays included, from the end of April to the middle of
October, and educating two hundred and forty delicate children chosen
from the elementary schools of Charlottenberg. We arrived there just
as the children were going to sit down to their afternoon meal of
bread and milk, and each child was fetching its own mug hanging on a
numbered hook. The meals in fine weather are taken at long tables in
the open air. When it rains they are served in big shelters closed on
three sides. Dotted about the forest there were mushroom-shaped
shelters with seats and tables beneath them, sufficient cover in
slight showers; and there were well lighted, well aired class-rooms,
where the children are taught for twenty-five minutes at a time.
All the buildings are on the Doecker system, and were manufactured by
Messrs. Christoph & Unmark of Niesky. This firm makes a speciality of
schools and hospitals, built in what we should call the bungalow
style. Of course, this style exactly suits the needs of the school in
the forest. There is not a staircase in the place, there is no danger
of fire, no want of ventilation, and very little work for housemaids
or charwomen. The school furniture is simple and carefully planned.
Some of it was designed by Richard Riemerschmid of Munich, the
well-known artist.
Each child has two and a half hours' work each day; all who are strong
enough do gymnastics, and all have baths at school. Each child has its
own locker and its own numbered blanket for use out of doors on damp
or chilly days. The doctor visits the school twice a week, and the
weight of each child is carefully watched. The busy sister who
superintends the housekeeping and the hygienic arrangements seemed to
know how much each child had increased already; and she told us what
quantities of food were consumed every day. The kitchen and larder
were as bright and clean as such places always are in Germany. When
the children arrive in the morning at half-past seven they have a
first breakfast of _Griesbrei_. At ten o'clock they have rolls and
butter. Their dinner consists of one solid dish. The day we were there
it had been pork and cabbage, a combination Germans give more
willingly to delicate children than we should; the next day it was to
be _Nudelsuppe_ and beef. At four o'clock they have bread and milk,
and just before they go home a supper like their early breakfast of
milk-soup, and bread. 260 litres of milk are used every day, 50 to 60
lbs. of meat, 2 cwts. potatoes, 30 big rye loaves, 280 rolls, and when
spinach, for instance, is given, 80 lbs. of spinach. We asked whether
the children paid, and were told that those who could afford it paid
from 25 to 45 pf. a day. The school is kept open throughout the summer
holidays, but no work is done then, and two-thirds of the teachers are
away. Although the children are at play for the greater part of the
day in term time, and all day in the holidays, the headmaster told us
that they gave no trouble. There was not a dirty or untidy child to be
seen, nor one with rough manners. They are allowed to play in the
light, sandy soil of the forest, much as English children play at the
seaside, and we saw the beginning of an elaborate chain of fortresses
defended by toy guns and decorated with flowers. We heard a lesson in
mental arithmetic given in one of the class-rooms, the boys sitting on
one side of the room and the girls on the other; and we found that
these young sickly children were admirably taught and well advanced
for their age. To be a teacher in one of these open-air schools is
hard work, because the strain is never wholly relaxed. All day long,
and a German day is very long, the children must be watched and
guarded, sheltered from changes in the weather and prevented from
over-tiring themselves. Many of them come from poor cramped homes, and
to spend the whole summer in the forest more at play than at work
makes them most happy. I met Germans who did not approve of the
_Waldschule_ who considered it a fantastic extravagant experiment, too
heavy for the rate-payers to bear. This is a side of the question that
the rate-payers must settle for themselves; but there is no doubt
about the results of the venture on the children sent to school in the
forest. They get a training that must shape their whole future, moral
and physical, a training that changes so many unsound citizens into
sound ones every year for the German Empire. If the rate-payers can
survive the strain it seems worth while.