Germany and the Germans from an American Point of View

by Price Collier

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 Einjähriger 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.