Germany and the Germans from an American Point of View

by Price Collier

There are two sides to this question of fine-tooth-comb education. Its advantages both America and England are seeing every day in these stout rivals of ours; but its disadvantages are not to be concealed, and are perhaps doing an undermining work that will be more apparent in the future than now it is. The very fact that an alien, an oriental race, the Jews, have taken so disproportionate a share of the cream of German prosperity, and have turned this technical prowess to purposes of their own, is, in and of itself, a sure sign that there may be an educated proletariat working slavishly for masters whom, with all their learning and all their mental discipline, they cannot force to abdicate.

Strange to say, the federal constitution of 1871, which gave Germany its emperor, did not include the schools, and each state has its own school system, but in 1875 an imperial school commission was formed which has done much to make the system of all the states uniform.

The three classes of schools recognized as leading later to a university career are the Gymnasium, in which Latin and Greek are still the fundamental requirements; the Realgymnasium, in which Latin but no Greek is required; the Oberrealschule, in which the classics are not taught at all, but emphasis is laid upon modern languages and natural science. In addition to these there are the so-called Reformschulen, of very recent growth, which are an attempt to put less emphasis upon the classics, but without excluding them entirely from the course, and to pay more attention proportionately to modern languages, French in particular. There are in addition some four hundred public and one thousand or more private higher girls’ schools, with an attendance of a quarter of a million, all subject to state supervision.

If one were to make a genealogical tree of the German schools which educate the children from the age of six up to the age of entrance to the university, it might be described as follows: First are the Volkschulen, which every child must attend from six to fourteen. In the smaller country schools the children of all ages may be in one school-room and under one teacher; in another, divided into two classes; in another, into three or four classes; up to the large city schools, in which they are divided on account of their number into as many as eight classes. Next would come the Mittelschulen, where the pupils are carried on a year farther, and where the last year corresponds to the first year of the so-called Lehrerbildungsanstalten, or training schools for teachers. These again are divided into two, one called Praeparanda, the other Seminar, the former carrying the pupil on to his sixteenth year, the latter to the nineteenth year and turning him out a full-fledged Volkschule teacher, and giving him the right to serve only one year in the army.

If boy or girl goes on from the fourteenth year, the höhere Knabenschulen and the höhere Mädchenschulen take them on to the eighteenth or nineteenth year. Many boys go on till they have passed from the lower Secunda, next to the last class, which is divided into upper and lower Secunda, into the upper Secunda, when their certificate entitles them to serve one year only in the army, when they quit school. Many boys, too, intending to become officers, leave school at sixteen or seventeen and go to regular cramming institutions, where they do their work more quickly and devote themselves to the special subjects required. For boys intending to go on through the higher schools, there are schools taking them on from the age of nine, with a curriculum better adapted than that of the Volkschulen to that end.

In all these higher schools there is less attention paid to mere examinations, and more attention paid to the general grip the pupils have on the work in hand; and of the teaching, as mentioned elsewhere, too much cannot be said in its praise.

For those boys who finish their public schooling at the age of fourteen and then turn to earning their living, there are the continuation schools, which are in many parts of the country compulsory, and which are nicely adapted, according to their situation in shopkeeping cities, in factory towns, or in the country, to give the pupils the drilling and instruction necessary for their particular employment. The average amount of expenditure for these continuation schools is $6,250,000. In Prussia there are some 1,500 of these schools, with an average attendance of 300,000 pupils.

According to the last census the proportion of illiterates among the recruits for the army was 0.02 per cent. The number of those who could neither read nor write in Germany was, in 1836, 41.44 per cent.; in 1909, 0.01 per cent. If one were to name all the agricultural schools; technical schools; schools of architecture and building; commercial schools, for textile, wood, metal, and ceramic industries; art schools; schools for naval architecture and engineering and navigation; and the public music schools, it would be seen that it is no exaggeration to speak of fine-tooth-comb education.

I have visited scores of all sorts of schools all over Germany, from a peasant common school in Posen up to that last touch in education, the schools in Charlottenburg, the Schulpforta Academy, and such a private boys’ school as Die Schülerheim-Kolonie des Arndt-Gymnasiums in the Grünewald near Berlin, and the training schools for the military cadets. Through the courtesy of the authorities I was permitted, when I wished it, to sit in the class-rooms, and even to put questions to the boys and girls in the classes. From the small boys and girls making their first efforts at spelling to the young woman of seventeen who translated a paragraph of the “Germania” of Tacitus, not into German but into French, for me (a problem I offered as a good test of whether I was merely assisting at a prepared exhibition of the prowess of the class or whether the minds had been trained to independence), I have looked over a wide field of teaching and learning in Germany. If that young person was typical of the pupils of this upper girls’ school, there is no doubt of their ability to meet an intellectual emergency of that kind.

Of one feature of German education one can write without reservation, and that is the teaching. Everywhere it is good, often superlatively good, and half a dozen times I have listened to the teaching of a class in history, in Latin, in German literature, in French literature, where it was a treat to be a listener. I remember in particular a class in physical geography, another reading Ovid, another reading Shakespeare, and another reading Goethe’s “Hermann and Dorothea,” where I enjoyed my half-hour, as though I had been listening to a distinguished lecturer on his darling subject.