Running races had become lately a German school amusement, but the results, as a rule, were that if there were five competitors, the four losers entered a protest against the winner. In any case, each of the four produced excellent excuses why he had lost, other than the fact that he had been properly beaten.
A learned American "exchange professor," who had returned from a
German university, whom I met in Boston last year on my way from
England to Germany, truly summed up the situation of athletics in
German schools by saying, "German boys are bad-tempered losers and
boastful winners."
Upon what kinds of history is the German child being brought up? The basis of it is the history of the House of Hohenzollern, with volumes devoted to the Danish and Austrian campaigns and minute descriptions of every phase of all the battles with France in 1870, written in a curious hysterical fashion.
The admixture of Biblical references and German boasting are typical of the lessons taught at German Sunday Schools, which play a great role in war propaganda. The schoolmaster having done his work for six days of the week, the pastor gives an extra virulent dose on the Sabbath. Sedan Day, which before the war was the culmination of hate lessons, often formed the occasion of Sunday School picnics, at which the children sang new anti-French songs.
There are some traits in German children most likeable. There are, for example, the respect for, and courtesy and kindness towards, anybody older than themselves. There are admiration for learning and ambition to excel in any particular task. There is a genuine love of music. On the other hand, there is much dishonesty, as may be witnessed by the proceedings in the German police courts, and has been proved in the gold and other collections.
The elimination of real religion in the education of children and the substitution of worship of the State is, in the minds of many impartial observers, something approaching a national catastrophe. In any other community it would probably be accompanied by anarchy. It certainly has swelled the calendar of German crime. German statistics prove that every sort of horror has been greatly on the increase in the last quarter of a century.
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. As a rule a German boy's career is marked out for him by his parents and the schoolmaster at a very early age. If he is to follow out any one of the thousand branches of chemical research dealing with coal-tar products, for example, he knows his fate at fourteen or fifteen, and his eye is rarely averted from his goal until he has achieved knowledge and experience likely to help him in the great German trade success which has followed their utilisation of applied science.
CHAPTER IV
PULPITS OF HATE
The unpleasant part played by the clergy, and especially the Lutheran pastors, needs to be explained to those who regard clerics as necessarily men of peace.