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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 took Latin for seven hours every week, and Greek for three hours. A professor who came solely for religious teaching came for ten hours every week. But most of the masters taught from sixteen to twenty-four hours, while one who is down for reading, writing, arithmetic, gymnastics, German, singing, and Natur could not get through all he had to do in less than thirty hours. On looking into the hours devoted to each subject by the various classes, you find that the lowest class had three hours religious instruction every week, and the other classes two hours. There were 407 boys in the school described as Evangelisch, 47 Jews, and 23 Catholics; but in Germany parents can withdraw their children from religious instruction in school, provided they satisfy the authorities that it is given elsewhere. The two highest classes had lessons on eight chapters of St. Paul's Epistle to the Romans, on the Epistle to the Philippians, and on the confessions of St. Augustine. Some classes were instructed in the Gospel according to St. John, and the little boys learned Bible History. So Germans are not without orthodox theological teaching in their early years, whatever opinions they arrive at in their adolescence.

Every boy in the school spent two or three hours each week on German composition, and, like boys in other countries, handled themes they could assuredly not understand, probably, like other boys, without a scruple or a hesitation.

"Why does the ghost of Banquo appear to Macbeth, and not the ghost of Duncan?"

"How are the unities of time, place, and action treated in Schiller's ballads?"

"Discuss the antitheses in Lessing's Laokoon."

"What can you say about the representation of concrete objects in Goethe's Hermann and Dorothea?"

These examples are taken at random from a list too long to quote completely; but no one need be impressed by them. Boys perform wonderful feats of this kind in England too. However, I once heard a German professor say that the English boy outdid the German in gesunder Menschenverstand (sound common sense), but that the German wins in the race when it comes to the abstract knowledge (Wissen) that he and his countryfolk prize above all the treasures of the earth. No one who knows both countries can doubt for a single moment that the professor was right, and that he stated the case as fairly as it can be stated. In an emergency or in trying circumstances the English boy would be readier and more self-reliant: but when you meet him where entertainment is wanted rather than resource, his ignorance will make you open your eyes. This, at any rate, is the kind of story told and believed of Englishmen in Germany. A student who was working at science in a German university had been there the whole winter, and though the city possessed many fine theatres he had only visited a variety show. At last his friends told him that it was his duty to go to the Schauspielhaus and see a play by Goethe or Schiller. "Goethe! Schiller!" said my Englishman, "Was ist das?"

The education of girls in Germany is in a transition state at present. Important changes have been made of late years, and still greater ones, so the reformers say, are pending. Formerly, if a girl was to be educated at all she went to a Höhere Töchterschule, or to a private school conducted on the same lines, and, like the official establishment, under State supervision. When she had finished with school she had finished with education, and began to work at the useful arts of life, more especially at the art of cooking. What she had learned at school she had learned thoroughly, and it was considered in those days quite as much as was good for her. The officials who watched and regulated the education of boys had nothing to do with girls' schools. These were left to the staff that managed elementary schools, and kept on much the same level. Girls learned history, geography, elementary arithmetic, two modern languages, and a great deal of mythology. The scandalous ignorance of mythology displayed by Englishwomen still shocks the right-minded German. If a woman asked for more than this because she was going to earn her bread, she spent three years in reading for an examination that qualified her for one of the lower posts in the school. The higher posts were all in the hands of men. Of late years women have been able to prepare for a teacher's career at one of the Teachers' Seminaries, most of which were opened in 1897.

More than forty years ago the English princess in Berlin was not satisfied with what was done in Germany for the education of women; and one of the many monuments to her memory is the Victoria Lyceum. This institution was founded at her suggestion by Miss Archer, an English lady who had been teaching in Berlin for some years, and who was greatly liked and respected there. At first it only aimed at giving some further education to girls who had left school, and it was not easy to get men of standing to teach them. But as it was the outcome of a movement with life in it the early difficulties were surmounted, and its scope and usefulness have grown since its foundation thirty-eight years ago. It is not a residential college, and it has no laboratories. During the winter it still holds courses of lectures for women who are not training for a definite career; but under its present head, Fräulein von Cotta, the chief work of the Victoria Lyceum has become the preparation of women for the Ober Lehrerin examination. This is a State examination that can only be passed five years after a girl has qualified as Lehrerin, and two of these five years must have been spent in teaching at a German school. To qualify as Lehrerin, a girl must have spent three years at a Seminary for teachers after she leaves school, and she usually gets through this stage of her training between the ages of fifteen and eighteen. Therefore a woman must have three years special preparation for a subordinate post and eight years for a higher post in a German girls' school.

The whole question of women's education is in a ferment in Germany at present, and though everyone interested is ready to talk of it, everyone tells you that it is impossible to foresee exactly what reforms are coming. There are to be new schools established, Lyceen and Ober-Lyceen, and Ober-Lyceen will prepare for matriculation. When girls have matriculated from one of these schools they will be ready for the university, and will work for the same examinations as men. Baden was the first German State that allowed women to matriculate at its universities. It did so in 1900, and in 1903 Bavaria followed suit. In 1905 there were eighty-five women at the universities who had matriculated in Germany; but there are hundreds working at the universities without matriculating first. At present the professors are free to admit women or to exclude them from their classes; but the right of exclusion is rarely exercised. Before long it will presumably be a thing of the past.

An Englishwoman residing at Berlin, and engaged in education, told me that in her opinion no German woman living had done as much for her countrywomen as Helene Lange, the president of the Allgemeine deutsche Frauenverein. Nineteen years ago she began the struggle that is by no means over, the struggle to secure a better education for women and a greater share in its control. In English ears her aim will sound a modest one, but English girls' schools are not entirely in the hands of men, with men for principals and men to teach the higher classes. She began in 1887 by publishing a pamphlet that made a great sensation, because it demanded, what after a mighty tussle was conceded, women teachers for the higher classes in girls' schools, and for these women an academic education. In 1890 she founded, together with Auguste Schmidt and Marie Loeper-Housselle, the Allgemeine deutsche Lehrerinnen-Verein, which now has 80 branches and 17,000 members. But the pluckiest thing she did was to fight Prussian officialdom and win. In 1889 she opened Real-Kurse für Mädchen und Frauen, classes where women could work at subjects not taught in girls' schools, Latin for instance, and advanced mathematics; for the State in Germany has always decided how much as well as how little women may learn. It would not allow people as ignorant as Squeers to keep a school because it offered an easy livelihood. It organised women's education carefully and thoroughly in the admirable German way; but it laid down the law from A to Z, which is also the German way. When, therefore, Helene Lange opened her classes for women, the officials came to her and said that she was doing an illegal thing. She replied that her students were not schoolgirls under the German school laws, but grown-up women free to learn what they needed and desired. The officials said that an old law of 1837 would empower them to close the classes by force if Helene Lange did not do so of her own accord. After some reflection and in some anxiety she decided to go on with them. By this time public opinion was on her side and came to her assistance; for public opinion does count in Germany even with the officials. The classes went on, and were changed in 1893 to Gymnasialkurse. In 1896 the first German women passed the Abiturienten examination, the difficult examination young men of eighteen pass at the end of a nine years' course in one of the classical schools. Even to-day you may hear German men argue that women should not be admitted to universities because they have had no classical training. Helene Lange was the first to prove that even without early training women can prepare themselves for an academic career. Her experiment led to the establishment of Gymnasialkurse in many German cities; and even to the admission of girls in some few cases to boys' Gymnasium schools.

To-day Helene Lange and her associates are contending with the schoolmasters, who desire to keep the management of girls' schools in their own hands. She calls the Höhere Töchterschule the failure of German school organisation, and she says that the difference of view taken by men and women teachers as to the proper work of girls' schools makes it most difficult to come to an understanding. Consciously or not, men form an ideal of what they want and expect of women, and try to educate them up to it; while women think of the claims life may make on a girl, and desire the full development of her powers. "The Higher Daughter," she says, "must vanish, and her place must be taken by the girl who has been thoroughly prepared for life, who can stand on her own feet if circumstances require it, or who brings with her as housewife the foundations of further self-development, instead of the pretentiousness of the half educated." In one of her many articles on the subject of school reform she points to three directions where reform is needed. What she says about the teaching of history is so characteristic of her views and of the modern movement in Germany, that I think the whole passage is worth translation:—