German school

“ Before the middle of the next century, a number of other states of Germany, such as Weimar, Hessen-Darmstadt, Mecklenburg, Holstein, Hessen-Cassel, and Gotha modeled elementary school systems after those of Saxony and Würtemberg. While the Catholics did not in general maintain public elementary education, the Christian Brothers and others undertook a great work in this direction, and Duke Albrecht V of Bavaria even ordered throughout his state the establishment of ‘German’ schools with instruction in reading, writing, and the Catholic creed. ”

“ Here the pupils learn to speak of our unique Schiller with the superciliousness of prigs; here they are taught to smile at the noblest and most German of his works—at the Marquis of Posa, at Max and Thekla—at these smiles German genius becomes incensed and a worthier posterity will blush.
"The last department in which the German teacher in a public school is at all active, which is often regarded as his sphere of highest activity, and is here and there even considered the pinnacle of public school education, is the so-called German composition. ”

“ The Prussian school system is the most efficient in the world, at least so far as the education of the masses is concerned. It has practically obliterated illiteracy in the kingdom, more than 991⁄2 per cent of the recruits received into the army in 1893 being able to read and write. Many countries have materially improved their school systems by adopting some of the lessons taught by Prussia.
The three most important features of the German school system are:—
1. Only professionally trained teachers can be employed. ”

“ If the German people are damned to satisfaction with irresponsible autocracy and fatuous docility, their schools have damned them. For a century, German education has been at work to breed the present world-menace. The German schools have made the German people what they are. ”

“ It is incumbent on such a state to mould the people's ideas of what their needs are. The schools obviously offer the most hopeful media for the accomplishment of that result, and they have been used in Germany more effectively in this way than the schools of any other country. The German school system follows hard and fast preconceptions of aims and ends, and because of this it was possible for Germany to put over its own particular sort of efficiency. ”

“ The next stage above the elementary is scholastic education, as it is supplied in grammar schools, whether public or private. According as the pupils are intended either to go on to a university, or to enter at once on leaving school on the practical work of life, these schools are divided into two classes. In the one class, which in Germany are called Realschulen, less Latin is taught, and no Greek, but more of mathematics, modern languages, and physical science ”

“ I went to Germany the first time under the impression that the Anglo-Saxon had much to learn from German education. I do not think that any observer in Germany itself to-day would find anything valuable to learn in the field of education, except when the German student comes to the time he takes up scientific research, to which the German mind, with its intense industry and regard for detail, is so eminently suited. The German Government gives these young students every advantage. They are not, as with us, obliged to start money-making as soon as they leave school. ”

“ It is commonly believed that German schools drive their children; and the discipline which they undergo is certainly exacting. Those who enter the elementary school do so on the completion of their sixth year, and they cannot leave it until the age of fourteen. ”

“ With this assumption, it will be seen that at the close of the period of secondary education our youth are about two years behind those of Germany. While it is not possible to test for purposes of exact comparison the training received by the graduates of our high schools with that of the German student with two years of his gymnasium course still before him, it is probably not far from the truth to say that not merely in relative time, but also in actual intellectual training, our high school graduates are two years behind those at the corresponding period in the German schools. ”

“ I think that any one who knows Germany well will agree with me that it is the influence of the teaching class, whether in school or university, that has transformed the German mentality so greatly during the last forty years. These two mild-mannered old Hentzes must have infected scores and hundreds of lads with their own aggressively militant views. By perpetually holding up to them their own dream of a Germany covering half Europe, they must have transmitted some of their own enthusiasm to their pupils, and underlying that enthusiasm was a tacit assumption that the end justified any means ”

“ The large and growing demand for teachers of German is a practical inducement to those who contemplate the teaching profession. Not only in the college and university, where broad courses of study in German, including the history and literature, are provided, but in the graded schools of the smaller towns, school boards are including German, and are seeking teachers competent to give such instruction. ”

“ I said, "that everything for which you have justly blamed the public school is only a necessary means employed to imbue the youthful student with some kind of independence, or at all events with the belief that there is such a thing. The teaching of German composition must be at the service of this independence: the individual must enjoy his opinions and carry out his designs early, so that he may be able to travel alone and without crutches. ”

“ As no woman can enter the Berlin University as a student, neither is it practicable for [59] a lady, either as student or visitor, to find access to the Gymnasia, which, in the German sense of this term, are somewhat in the line of our American colleges. My windows looked into those of a fine new building across the street, devoted to the instruction of German youth. In through its doors there filed, every week-day morning, long lines of German boys and young men for the various grades of instruction; and a natural desire arose in the mind of an old teacher to "visit the school." ”

“ The German system of education is very rigid for the boys and girls. The discipline in the common schools is military. The children go to school more months in the year and they are compelled to learn. ”

“ Thus, the peculiar conditions of modern language instruction bring it about that a discussion of its organization in college must deal with a six years' course: elementary instruction must be offered to those entering without any knowledge of German; courses of a sufficiently advanced character must be provided for those who enter with three or four years of high-school German; and there must be advanced work for students who intend to make the study and teaching of German their life's work. ”

“ The professional Reformer here in America is not even yet fully conscious that German paternalism (a phase of German efficiency) is the token of an enslaved people.
The German educational system as much if not more than its other imperial schemes has been instrumental in developing the German brand of industrial efficiency. The perfection in Germany of its technological processes is made possible as the youth of the country has been consecrated and sacrificed to the development of this perfection in the early years of school training. ”

“ He cannot enter the university until he breathes the university atmosphere. The 'Spurstudenten' or 'railway students' those who come and go on the trains, are rightly held by their fellows in Germany to be little more than Philistines. Whatever the other excellencies of the German system, the gymnasium, or advanced high school, is an inadequate substitute for the American college. ”

“ On the other hand, other types of secondary schools have sprung up, laying stress on modern languages, history and science. In Germany the secondary system of to-day comprises the classical school or gymnasium, giving a nine years' course, the scientific school or realschule, the course of which is the same in length or shorter, and various intermediate types. The curriculum of the gymnasium includes religion, German, Latin, Greek, French, history, geography, mathematics, natural history, physics, writing and drawing. ”

“ Modern sides, army classes and engineering classes grow up as excrescences upon an originally classical type, with the waste of power that results from loss of consistency and concentration of purpose. The difference between the English and German systems is due ultimately to the adoption in Germany of the day-school system and the absence, very remarkable in an otherwise aristocratically governed country, of the caste spirit in education above the elementary level, thanks to which the nobly born are not ashamed to sit on the school bench side by side with the children of the trading classes. ”

“ That Germany bears away the crown of school economy from all other countries, is not to be denied. Or where is the country which has more flourishing schools than Prussia, Wirtemberg, Baden, etc.
We here conclude with the words with which we commenced--"the nineteenth century is the age of enlightenment;" and Germany propels at the highest speed its spirit towards intellectual consciousness. It possesses a moral vigour which no other nation of the earth possesses, and the giant arms of German art and science embrace the whole wide surface of the globe with an all-living power. ”

“ I have never seen a body of young men all so well physically developed as the pupils of the trade school, a result produced by constant attention to their education on this point. Children who are not healthy, or who have failed in the elementary school, are apprenticed at fourteen, and the institution ceases to have the charge of them.
In the Elementary School, the usual branches taught in the common schools of Prussia are pursued, including reading, writing, arithmetic, the German language, geography, drawing, religious instruction, and a little natural history. ”

“ He begins to follow the ordinary curriculum of the German secondary schools, and knows exactly what stage he has reached on the ladder of learning; for every child in Germany, be he prince or peasant, educated at home or at school, works to a certain universal standard which, whatever may be its drawback, establishes a curious educational bond throughout the Empire and is eminently characteristic of the nation.
The tutor, who usually resides in the royal palace, is of a type unknown in England. ”

“ In every school the educational aims must be moral training, education in citizenship, personal and vocational efficiency and above all, the cultivation of German national character and of the spirit of international reconciliation. ”

“ It is admitted that those who begin German in the high school, after the second year, can keep up with and do as good work in the same classes as those who have had eight years of German in the primary and grammar grades and two years in the high schools. ”

“ But such arguments, we may well hope, will no longer win the uncritical assent that they have sometimes found. German education may be more efficient in the fulfilment of its end than American education—but what an end it has sought and reached! In the moment of our temptation to undemocratic short cuts in education, we shall henceforth look to the Germany of yesterday and today, and shall be strengthened to resist. Her ways are not our ways. Her schools cannot be ours. Education must mean to America something quite different from what it has meant to Germany. ”

“ It trains its pupils to think and choose for themselves. It prizes initiative above conformity, responsibility above mere efficiency, social good will above unthinking obedience.
Such education is more difficult, of course, than education of the undemocratic type. We shall at times be tempted to fall back into the ways of the German schools in some respect or other, because they represent the line of least resistance in education. Specious arguments will be presented in favor of these ways by shortsighted "practical" men. Education of the German type is more efficient, they will say ”

“ Of the school structures in modern Germany it would be idle to pretend that they are not excellent in every respect—perfect ventilation, sanitation, plenty of space, large numbers of class-rooms, and halls for the choral singing, which is part of the German system of education, and by which the "hate" songs have been so readily spread. ”

“ But the odd fact is, that the Briton who leaves school a man is more under control at Oxford [48] or Cambridge than the German at Heidelberg who leaves school a boy.
A German university is a teaching institution which prepares for the State examinations, and is never residential. There are no old colleges. The professors live in flats like other people, and the students live in lodgings or board with private families. There is one building or block of buildings called the Universität where there are laboratories and lecture-rooms. The State can decline a professor chosen by the university ”

“ If here and there one objected that German education seemed to sacrifice the individual to the system and to beget an obedience too implicit, we felt that it was only because the Germans are such docile, pious, family folk, and we rather chided ourselves for our rougher ways and for that self-will that made us unholily thankful that we had been born in a freer land. ”

“ The German preparing for one or other of the learned professions will probably spend a year or two at each of three, or maybe four, universities, according to the special faculty he adopts and for which the university has a reputation. There are plenty of hard-working students of course; nowadays probably the great majority are of this kind; but to a large proportion also the university period is still a pleasant, free, and easy halting-place between the severe discipline and work of the school and the stern struggle of the working world. ”