Foreigners are admissible at a yearly payment of 300 dollars (45l.,) and a few extra day scholars (Hospitanten,) when the classes are not too full, are received for 20 dollars a year (3l.)
The King’s cadetships are granted, according to the pecuniary circumstances of the applicants, to the children of officers of the standing army, or of the Landwehr, who have distinguished themselves or have been invalided in actual service in the field; to the children of non-commissioned officers who have in like manner distinguished themselves and received severe wounds in the service; and to those of any citizens who have performed any special service to the state. The sons of meritorious officers who have died in indigence or have retired upon pensions, the sons of indigent officers in general in the standing army, and the sons of meritorious non-commissioned officers of twenty-five years’ standing, are also in like manner eligible.
In very special cases of poverty, the supplementary payment is dispensed with altogether.
Pensioners are admitted from all classes and professions according to priority of application, and to their qualifications as shown by their examination. A great number of these are said to be the sons of officers, of those, namely, who are not in need of pecuniary assistance. And the number of the pensioners generally appears to be steadily on the increase. In the regulations printed in 1850, the places open for this class of cadets are stated to be only 216; at present, as has been seen, provision is made for something like double that number.
The four junior schools at Culm, Potsdam, Wahlstatt, and Bensberg, are all divided for purposes of instruction upon the same uniform plan into four classes, numbered up from six to three—Sexta at the bottom; Quinta; Quarta; and Tertia at the top. The upper school at Berlin succeeds with three classes, the second, the first, and the special or select—Secunda, Prima, and Selecta. Each of these classes, however, may contain any number of co-ordinate subdivisions, all taught the same subjects, and presumed to contain pupils of the same capacity. No teacher, it is considered, can satisfactorily undertake to give a lesson to more than thirty at a time; and the Secunda at Berlin was thus parted out in the year ending March, 1856, into eight little sets of rather less than thirty, the Prima into six, and the Selecta into two.
The junior cadet house at Potsdam occupies four or five buildings a little way out of the town. The class-rooms are on the usual Prussian plan, not arranged for lectures to large, but for lessons with small numbers. One distinguishing feature is the character of the arrangements of the rooms up-stairs, in which the boys pass their time out of school hours. They are very comfortable chambers, perhaps rather small for the numbers at present placed in them; they are ranged along a corridor; ten pupils are placed in each, and between every two rooms is the apartment of one of the resident tutors (Erzieher or Gouverneur,) who sees that all goes on right in these two rooms under his charge. Here the boys sit and work, and during the hours when they are expected to be preparing their lessons, are carefully looked after by their tutors.
These little apartments occupy one whole floor of the building. The floor above is that of the dormitories, containing each, perhaps, as many as sixty. The number at present in the school was stated to be two hundred and five, and the accommodation properly intended for only one hundred and sixty.
Colonel von Rosenberg, the commandant of the school, stated that eleven was the usual age at which the pupils came. This he appeared to think was rather too early, and he was inclined to attribute to this cause certain points in the character of young men who have been educated in the cadet corps. Eighty of his two hundred and five pupils were pensioners, or paying pupils; many of these also were the sons of officers. The teachers and tutors are partly civilians and partly military men, about an equal number of each. The four classes, Tertia, Quarta, Quinta, and Sexta, are subdivided into nine, so that the average number at a lesson would not be more than twenty-three.