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.
We know how little these men and women teachers are paid, but there is such a flood of intellectual output in Germany that the competition is ferocious in these callings, and the schools can pick and choose only from those who have borne the severest tests with the greatest success. The teaching is so good that it explains in part the amount of work these poor children are enabled to get through. School begins at seven in summer, at eight in winter. The course for those intending to go to the university is nine years; the recitation hours alone range from twenty-five to thirty-two hours a week; to which must be added two hours a week of singing and three hours a week of gymnastics, and this for forty-two weeks in the year. The preparation for class-work requires from two and a half to four hours more. It foots up to something like fifty hours a week!