Home Life in Germany. Mrs. Alfred Sidgwick

they greet you; just such a curtsey as Miss Austen's heroines must have made to their friends. The little boys, if you are staying in the house with them, come and shake hands at unexpected times—when they arrive from school, for instance, and before they go out for a walk. At first they take you by surprise, but you soon learn to be ready for them. They play many of the same games as English children, and I need hardly say that they are brought up on the same fairy stories, because many of our favourites come from Germany. The little boys wear sensible carpenters' aprons indoors, made of leather or American cloth; and the little girls still wear bib aprons of black alpaca. Their elders do not play games with them as much as English people do with their children. They are expected to entertain and employ themselves; and the immense educational value of games, the training they are in temper, skill, and manners, is not understood or admitted in Germany as it is here. The Kindergarten exercises are not competitive, and do not teach a child to play a losing game with effort and good grace.

      

CHAPTER IIIToC

       Table of Contents

      SCHOOLS

      German children go to day schools. This is not to say that there are no boarding schools in Germany; but the prevailing system throughout the empire is a system of day schools. The German mother does not get rid of her boys and girls for months together, and look forward to the holidays as a time of uproar and enjoyment. She does not wonder anxiously what changes she will see in them when they come back to her. They are with her all the year round—the boys till they go to a university, the girls till they marry. Any day in the streets of a German city you may see troops of children going to school, not with a maid at their heels as in Paris, but unattended as in England. They have long tin satchels in which they carry their books and lunch, the boys wear peaked caps, and many children of both sexes wear spectacles.

      Except at the Kindergarten, boys and girls are educated separately and differently in Germany. In some rare cases lately some few girls have been admitted to a boys' Gymnasium, but this is experimental and at present unusual. It may be found that the presence of a small number in a large boys' school does not work well. In addition to the elementary schools, there are four kinds of Public Day School for boys in Germany, and they are all under State supervision. There is the Gymnasium, the Real-Gymnasium, the Ober-Real-Schule, and the Real-Schule. Until 1870 the Gymnasiums were the only schools that could send their scholars to the universities; a system that had serious disadvantages. 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.

      A boy who has passed through one of these higher schools has had twelve years' education. He began Latin at the age of ten, and Greek at thirteen. He has learned some French and mathematics, but no English unless he paid for it as an extra. His school years have been chiefly a preparation for the university. If he never reaches the higher classes he leaves the Gymnasium with a stigma upon him, a record of failure that will hamper him in his career. The higher official posts and the professions will be closed to him; and he will be unfitted by his education for business. This at least is what many thoughtful Germans say of their classical schools; and they lament over the unsuitable boys who are sent to them because their parents want a professor or a high official in the family. It is considered more sensible to send an average boy to a Real-Gymnasium or to an Ober-Real Schule, because nowadays these schools prepare for the university, and any boy with a turn for scholarship can get the training he needs. The Ober-Real Schule professedly pays most attention to modern languages; and it is, in fact, only since 1900 that their boys are received at a university on the classical side. They still prepare largely for technical schools and for a commercial career.

      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. In some parts of Germany the fees are rather higher, in some still lower. The headmasters of these schools are all university men, and are themselves under State supervision. In an entertaining play called Flachsmann als Erzieher the headmaster had not been doing his duty, and has allowed the school to get into a bad way. The subordinates are either slack or righteously rebellious, and the children are unruly. The State official pays a surprise visit, discovers the state of things, and reads the Riot Act all round. The wicked headmaster is dismissed, the eager young reformer is put in his place, the slackers are warned and given another chance. … Blessed be St. Bureaukrazius … says the genial old god out of a machine, when by virtue of his office he has righted every man's wrongs. The school in the play must be an elementary one, for children and teachers are of both sexes, but a master at a Gymnasium told me that the picture of the official visit was not exaggerated in its importance and effect. There was considerable excitement in Germany over the picture of the evil headmaster, his incompetent staff, and the neglected children; and I was warned before I saw the play that I must not think such a state of affairs prevailed in German schools. The warning was quite unnecessary. An immoral, idle, and ignorant class of men could not carry on the education of a people as it is carried on throughout the German Empire to-day.

      I have before me the Annual Report of a Gymnasium in Berlin, and it may interest English people to see how many lessons the teachers in each subject gave every week. There were thirty teachers in the school.

Subject	Lessons per Week
Religion	31
German	42
Latin	112
Greek	72
French	36
History and Geography	44
Mathematics and Arithmetic	56
Natural History	10
Physics	20
Hebrew	4
Law	1
Writing	6
Drawing	18
Singing	12
Gymnasium	27
Swimming	8½
Handfertigkeit	3
	502½ lessons

      The headmaster