Realschule

“ Special trade schools, or industrial or commercial schools, adapted to the special occupations of the place, are also open to the boy who has completed his people's school course. From these elementary schools, with a variety of other schools which one may attend, the pupil passes to the secondary schools—the Ober-Realschule the Realgymnasium, and the Gymnasium ”

“ Hence the importance attached by the Germans to nomenclature; so that in selecting a Gymnasium, a Realgymnasium or an Oberrealschule, the parent knows exactly the type of education he is going to secure for his son. In England, on the other hand, as has often been observed, a great school tends to multiply within itself different types of curricula in a haphazard way according to the demand of parents, whose original choice of school is based rather on social than on educational grounds. ”

“ For the easier survey we may think of a boundary drawn at what in Germany would be between the Obersekunda and Prima of a Gymnasium or Realschule. Now, three such units of the system lie before and two after this line of demarcation. The son of a well-to-do family, who is to study medicine in Harvard University, will probably reach this line of demarcation in his eighteenth year. If he is advanced according to the normal scheme he will have entered a primary school at six years of age, the grammar school at ten, and the high school at fourteen. ”

“ 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 ”

“ After three years in the preliminary school the pupil begins his nine-year course in preparation for the university. In some of the states of the German Empire the pupil may be transferred into the Gymnasium from the earliest grades of the common school, but from this point on there is no commerce whatsoever, in teaching staff, in course of study, or in pupil constituency, between the common school and the school of the aristocracy. The division in France is quite as strict. In England transfer in the later years of the common-school course can be made, but only on the basis of examinations. ”

“ Nothing can indeed be more vexatious, and even in many cases, unsettling, than for an able scholar of the Real-school, after he has passed his examination, and has given ample proof that he is quite qualified to enter the university, to have again to make the course of the Gymnasium, again to weary himself with the reading and study of the ancient classics, entirely for the sake of the formality of promotion, which might just as well be conferred on the Real-schools, and by which money and more especially time might be spared. ”

“ I should be much happier working out theorems in a class-room. And it was also possible that I might have said something that some one had overheard—at any rate, I was not going to risk it. I sat silent at my desk and accepted meekly the common lot.
From the outside a Preparatory School looks very much like a miniature Public School. It presents the same features, the same routine, the same curriculum; there is even some attempt at a prefectorial system. Superficially they have much in common. But there the resemblance ends. The scale of values is altogether different. ”

“ The school system and its relations to local authorities, on the one hand, and to the general government, on the other, form a vast and difficult subject involving not merely pedagogical principles, but also such aims as the maintenance of higher learning, the dissemination of useful information, and the practice of indispensable arts. In university lectures a few words on such topics suffice, since young men who accept a school position assume, at the same time, obligations which for a long time to come prescribe for them the path they must follow. ”

“ ARTICLE 148 All schools shall inculcate moral education, civic sentiment, and personal and vocational efficiency in the spirit of German national culture and of international conciliation.
In the instruction in public schools care shall be taken not to hurt the feelings of those of differing opinion.
Civics and manual training are included in the school curriculum. Every pupil receives a copy of the Constitution on completing the obligatory course of study.
The common school system, including university extension work, shall be cherished by the Commonwealth, States and municipalities. ”

“ Thus we see that this second section in the great institution of learning fills in the elementary framework, enriches the fund of information, adds a considerable amount of culture, and paves the way for the more liberal training to follow in the next section.
The Gymnasium succeeds and builds directly upon the work of the middle school. Its function is to provide a liberal culture and education suited to the needs and desires of those who become in large part the leaders in all phases of political, professional, or other social careers. ”

“ For childhood, or from six to twelve, was to be organized the ‘vernacular school,’ which should appear in every hamlet and village. From that time up to eighteen comes the ‘Latin school,’ to be maintained in every city; and, finally, for youth from eighteen to twenty-four, there should be a university in every kingdom or province. Such an organization would have made education universal, and would tend to bring about the custom of education according to ability, rather than social status, which was a suggestion some three centuries in advance of the times. ”

“ CHAPTER XIII THE AIM OF THE UNIVERSITY
"All public institutions of learning are called into existence by social needs, and first of all by technical practical necessities. Theoretical interests may lead to the founding of private associations such as the Greek philosophers' schools; public schools owe their origin to the social need for professional training. Thus during the Middle Ages the first schools were called into being by the need of professional training for ecclesiastics, the first learned profession, and a calling whose importance seemed to demand such training. ”

“ At a Real-Schule, the fourth grade of higher school, the course only lasts six years. They do not prepare for the Abiturienten examination, and their scholars cannot go from them to a university. They prepare for practical life, and they admit promising boys from the elementary schools. A boy who has been through any one of these higher schools successfully need only serve in the army for one year; and that in itself is a great incentive to parents to send their children. A Real-Schule in Prussia only costs a hundred marks a year, and a Gymnasium a hundred and thirty-five marks. ”

“ Thirty teachers are employed to teach these eight hundred girls,—twenty gentlemen and ten ladies. I said that in America the lady teachers largely outnumbered the gentlemen. The lady with whom I was conversing replied that the upper classes in girls' schools were all taught by gentlemen, as the ladies were not prepared to pass the required examinations for these positions. "The gentlemen have a course in the Gymnasium about equal to that in your colleges," she said, "and then pursue a course in the University, in order to fit themselves for teachers." ”

“ For a Public School has to equip a boy for life; and life is vast, indeterminate, a swiftly moving river that is never the same from one moment to another. The Preparatory School, on the other hand, has only to equip a boy for a Public School, and the Public School is a fixed quantity. As regards curriculum, the task is simple. The required standard of education is known. A certain percentage in the common entrance examination has to be obtained. The school has not to discover the career for which its individual members are best suited. ”

“ It meant that in choosing a child's school, parents had to decide whether at the end of his school life he was to have a university education. Children with no aptitude for scholarship were sent to these schools to receive a scholar's training; while boys who would have done well in one of the learned professions could not be admitted to a university, except for science or modern languages, because they had not attended a Gymnasium. ”

“ These schools, like the elementary schools, should be open to all children, of the poor as well as the rich. They should be set up, like the German gymnasium, in convenient localities, so that all the population may have access to them. They should embrace every useful branch suited to young men and women under sixteen and eighteen years of age—English composition, English language, history, classics, modern language, and elementary science. ”

“ In the course of the gradual extension of such efforts many a defect will come to light. It may be found, for instance, that the school is not a whole, because of the lack of a competent teacher for an important subject, or because of marked inequalities of knowledge and culture due to the preparatory schools, or because the school (such as those in small towns) follows the curriculum of a gymnasium while its real aim is supposed to be that of a burgher school, etc. ”

“ A real school, a real instrument of education, would take the place of the noisy congregation of uncontrolled boys and girls, who, in the country district-school, are apt to acquire less of valuable learning than of the minor viciousness that prevails among country children. ”

“ The academy and college take young men from the district and high schools, and furnish them with additional aids for the business of life; but the Normal School is truly the helper of the common schools. It receives its pupils from them, fits these pupils for teachers, and sends them back to superintend where a few months before they were scholars. ”

“ These men regard the school as a psychological observatory, where they are to practise the very difficult art of discovering the capacities of the pupils, receiving them with a tender consideration for the good and evil they bring with them, and with an apt adjustment of the resources of education to their individual needs. The primary or communal schools come first in number. In every hamlet, where there may be twenty girls and boys, the communal officials must provide a school-house and hire a master. ”

“ For this reason, the Teacher in these lower Schools should be a partaker of the Idea, because it is his task imperceptibly to familiarize the youth with the high and noble before he is able for himself to distinguish these from the vulgar, to accustom him to these, and to estrange him from the low and ignoble. Thus guarded in his early years, and thus prepared for higher progress, the youth enters the University. ”

“ There are now worthy teachers who will carry on the work of rational education elsewhere; others failed from moral or intellectual incapacity.
Not feeling that the pupils of the Modern School who devoted themselves to teaching would find time for their work, I established a Normal School, of which I have already spoken. I was convinced that, if the key of the social problem is in the scientific and rational school, it is essential, to make a proper use of the key, that fitting teachers be trained for so great a destiny. ”

“ The true Normal School instructs only in the art of teaching; and, in this respect, it must be confessed we have failed, sadly failed, to realize the ideal of the system. It is not a substitute for the common school, academy, or college, though many pupils, and in some degree the public, have been inclined thus to treat it. There should be no instruction in the departments of learning, high or low, except what is incidental to the main business of the institution ”

“ It must obviously make a vast difference whether pupils look forward to the university, or whether the gymnasium is filled with boys who do not intend to pursue higher studies; whether a burgher school sets a final examination to mark the stage of general culture to which the school is expected to advance the pupils, or whether the pupils enter and leave without well-defined reasons according to what seems best to their respective families ”

“ The earth is covered with their Latin colleges; and wherever they have been able, they have put their hands on the institutions for university education; but in no instance have they founded a primary school. Even in their establishment for secondary instruction, they entrust the lower classes to teachers who do not belong to their order, and reserve to themselves the direction of the higher classes. ”

“ The future masters for the different lyceums and colleges are all educated in a special school known as the École Normale, founded under the First Republic, and where, according to the government order calling it into existence, the students have not only to receive instruction, but to be taught the art of imparting it. ”

“ Every new school, not a college, makes the demand for the college course greater [Pg 352] than it was before; and the advance made in our public schools increases the students in the colleges and the university. We build from the primary school to the college; and without the primary school and its dependents,—the grammar, high school, and academy,—the colleges would cease to exist. ”

“ Consider the training schools for teachers—the normal schools. These occupy at present a somewhat anomalous position, intermediate between the high school and the college, requiring the high-school preparation, and covering a certain amount of college work. They are isolated from the higher subject-matter of scholarship, since, upon the whole, their object has been to train persons how to teach, rather than what to teach; while, if we go to the college, we find the other half of this isolation—learning what to teach, with almost a contempt for methods of teaching. ”