It was undoubtedly true, William went on to admit, that in 1864, 1866, and 1870 the Prussian teachers’ work showed to advantage. They had in those past years done a good deal to inculcate, and thus help to fruition, the idea of national unity--and it was safe to say that during that period every one who completed his _gymnasium_ course went away after the final examination convinced that the German Empire should be reestablished, and crowned by the restoration of Alsace-Lorraine. But with 1871 this practical process of education came abruptly to an end, although as a matter of fact there was more than ever a need of teaching young Germans the importance of preserving their Empire and its political system intact. The consequence was that certain malignant forces had grown up and developed to a threatening degree, and for this the schools were clearly to blame.
Since 1870, he proceeded, there had been in German education a veritable reign of the philologists. They had been sitting there enthroned in the _gymnasia_, devoting all their attention to stuffing their pupils’ skulls with mere book-learning, without even a thought of striving to form their characters aright, or training them for the real needs and trials of practical life. This evil had gone so far that it could go no farther. He knew that it was the custom to describe him as a fanatical foe to the _gymnasium_ system. This was not true; only he had an open eye for its defects as well as its merits--of which, unfortunately, there seemed a heavy preponderance of the former.
Chief among these defects, to his mind, was a preposterous partiality for the classics. He submitted to his hearers, as patriots no less than professors, that the basis of this public school education should be German, and the aim kept always in view should be to turn out young Germans, not young Greeks and Romans. There must be an end to this folly. They must courageously break away from the mediaeval and monkish habit of mumbling over much Latin and some Greek, and take to the German language as the basis of their teaching. This remark applied also to history. Thoroughness in German history, both authenticated and legendary, and in its geographical and ethnological connections, should be first of all insisted upon. It was only when, they were wholly familiar with the ins and outs of their own house that they could afford the time to moon about in a museum.