Читать книгу Home Life in Germany - Mrs. Alfred Sidgwick - Страница 13

There are no people in the world who need driving to school less than the Germans. There are no people in the world who set so high a value on knowledge. In the old days, when they lived with Jove in the clouds, they valued knowledge solely for its own sake, and did not trouble much about its practical use in the world. It is absurd to say, as people often do now, that this spirit is dead in the nation. You cannot be long in the society of Germans without recognising that it survives wherever the stress of modern life leaves room for it. You see that when a German makes money his sons constantly enter the learned and the artistic professions with his full approval, though they are most unlikely to make a big income in this way. You are told by people who work amongst the poor, that parents will make any sacrifices year after year in order to send a boy to one of the higher schools. You know that the Scotsmen who live on oatmeal while they acquire learning have their counterparts in the German universities, where many a student would not dine at all if private or organised charity did not give him a dinner so many days a week. Sometimes you have heard it said of such and such a great German, that he was so poor when he was young that he had to accept these free dinners given in every German university town to penniless students. The fact would be remembered, but it would never count against a man in Germany. The dollar is not almighty there.

To say, therefore, that education is compulsory throughout the empire is not to say that it is unpopular. A teacher in an elementary school was once telling me how particular the authorities were that every child, even the poorest, should come to school properly clothed and shod. "For instance," she said, "if a child comes to school in house-shoes he is sent straight home again." "But do the parents mind that?" I asked from my English point of view, for the teacher was speaking of people who in England would live in slums and care little whether their children were educated or not. But in Germany even the poorest of the poor do care, and to refuse a child admission to school is an effective punishment. At any rate, you may say this of the majority. No doubt if school was not compulsory the dregs of the nation would slip out of the net, especially in those parts of the empire where the prevalent character is shiftless and easy going. "When you English think that we hold the reins too tight, it is because you do not understand what a mixed team we have to drive," a north German said to me. "We should not get on, we should not hold together long, if our rule was slack and our attention careless."

At the last census only one in 10,000 could not read or write, and these dunces were all Slavs. But how even a Slav born under the eye of the Eagle can remain illiterate is a mystery. In 1905 there were 59,348 elementary schools in the empire, and their organisation is as elaborate and well planned as the organisation of the army. In Berlin alone there are 280. All the teachers at these schools have been trained to teach at special seminaries, and have passed State examinations that qualify them for their work. In Germany many men and women, entitled both by class and training to teach in the higher grade schools, have taken up work in the elementary ones from choice. I know one lady whose certificates qualify her to teach in a Höhere Töchterschule and who elects to teach a large class of backward children in a Volkschule. Her ambition is to teach those children described in Germany as nicht völlig normal: children we should describe as "wanting." She says that her backward children repay her for any extra trouble they give by their affection and gratitude. She knows the circumstances of every child in her class, and where there is real need she can get help from official sources or from philanthropic organisations, because a teacher's recommendation carries great weight in Germany. This lady gets up every day in summer at a quarter past five, in order to be in school by seven. Her school hours are from seven to eleven in summer, and from eight till twelve in winter; but she has a great deal of work to prepare and correct after school. Her salary is raised with every year of service, and when she is past work she will be entitled to a State pension of thirty pounds.

Children have to attend school from the age of six and to stay till they are fourteen; and in their school years they are not allowed to work at a trade without permission. They do not learn foreign languages, but they are thoroughly grounded in German, and they receive religious instruction. Of course, they learn history, geography, and arithmetic. In the new schools every child is obliged to have a warm bath every week, but it is not part of a teacher's duties to superintend it. Probably the women who clean the school buildings do so. In the old schools, where there are no bathrooms, the children are given tickets for the public bathing establishments. The State does not supply free food, but there are philanthropic societies that supply those children who need it with a breakfast of bread and milk in winter. Everyone connected with German schools says that no child would apply for this if his parents were not destitute, and one teacher told me a story of the headmaster's boy being found, to his father's horror and indignation, seated with the starving children and sharing their free lunch. He had brought his own lunch with him, but it was his first week at school, and he thought that a dispensation of bread and milk in the middle of the morning was part of the curriculum.

School books are supplied to children too poor to buy them, and it seems that no trouble is given by applications for this kind of relief by people not entitled to it. Gymnastics are compulsory for both boys and girls in the lower classes, and choral singing is taught in every school. Teachers must all be qualified to accompany singing on the violin. Most of the elementary schools in Prussia are free. Some few charge sixpence a month. A child can even have free teaching in its own home if it is able to receive instruction, but not to attend school. Medical inspection is rigorously carried out in German elementary schools. The doctor not only watches the general health of the school, but he registers the height, weight, carriage, state of nourishment, and vaccination marks of each child on admission; the condition of the eyes and ears and any marked constitutional tendency he can discover. Every child is examined once a month, when necessary once a fortnight. In this way weak or wanting children are weeded out, and removed to other surroundings, the short-sighted and the deaf are given places in the schoolroom to suit them. The system protects the child and helps the teacher, and has had the best results since it was introduced into Prussia in 1888.

Attendance at continuation schools is now compulsory on boys and girls for three years after leaving the elementary school, where they have had eight years steady education. They must attend from four to six hours weekly; instruction is free, and is given in the evening, when the working day is over. Certain classes of the community are free, but about 30,000 students attend these schools in Berlin. The subjects taught are too many to enumerate. They comprise modern languages, history, law, painting, music, mathematics, and various domestic arts, such as ironing and cooking. More boys than girls attend these schools, as girls are more easily exempt. It is presumably not considered so necessary for them as for their brothers to continue their education after the age of fourteen.

One of the most interesting experiments being made in Germany at present is the "open air" school, established for sickly children during the summer months. The first one was set up by the city of Charlottenberg at the suggestion of their Schulrat and their school doctor, and it is now being imitated in other parts of Germany. From Charlottenberg the electric cars take you right into the pine forest, far beyond the last houses of the growing city. The soil here is loose and sandy, and the air in summer so soft that it wants strength and freshness. But as far out as this it is pure, and the medical men must deem it healing, for they have set up three separate ventures close together amongst the pine trees. One belongs to the Society of the Red Cross, and here sick and consumptive women come with their children for the day, and are waited on by the Red Cross sisters. We saw some of them lying about on reclining chairs, and some, less sickly, were playing croquet. The second establishment is for children who are not able to do any lessons, children who have been weeded out by the school doctor because they are backward and sickly. There are a hundred and forty children in this school, and there is a crêche with twenty beds attached to it for babies and very young children. One airy room with two rows of neat beds was for rickety children.

The third and largest of the settlements was the Waldschule, open every day, Sundays included, from the end of April to the middle of October, and educating two hundred and forty delicate children chosen from the elementary schools of Charlottenberg. We arrived there just as the children were going to sit down to their afternoon meal of bread and milk, and each child was fetching its own mug hanging on a numbered hook. The meals in fine weather are taken at long tables in the open air. When it rains they are served in big shelters closed on three sides. Dotted about the forest there were mushroom-shaped shelters with seats and tables beneath them, sufficient cover in slight showers; and there were well lighted, well aired class-rooms, where the children are taught for twenty-five minutes at a time.

All the buildings are on the Doecker system, and were manufactured by Messrs. Christoph & Unmark of Niesky. This firm makes a speciality of schools and hospitals, built in what we should call the bungalow style. Of course, this style exactly suits the needs of the school in the forest. There is not a staircase in the place, there is no danger of fire, no want of ventilation, and very little work for housemaids or charwomen. The school furniture is simple and carefully planned. Some of it was designed by Richard Riemerschmid of Munich, the well-known artist.

Each child has two and a half hours' work each day; all who are strong enough do gymnastics, and all have baths at school. Each child has its own locker and its own numbered blanket for use out of doors on damp or chilly days. The doctor visits the school twice a week, and the weight of each child is carefully watched. The busy sister who superintends the housekeeping and the hygienic arrangements seemed to know how much each child had increased already; and she told us what quantities of food were consumed every day. The kitchen and larder were as bright and clean as such places always are in Germany. When the children arrive in the morning at half-past seven they have a first breakfast of Griesbrei. At ten o'clock they have rolls and butter. Their dinner consists of one solid dish. The day we were there it had been pork and cabbage, a combination Germans give more willingly to delicate children than we should; the next day it was to be Nudelsuppe and beef. At four o'clock they have bread and milk, and just before they go home a supper like their early breakfast of milk-soup, and bread. 260 litres of milk are used every day, 50 to 60 lbs. of meat, 2 cwts. potatoes, 30 big rye loaves, 280 rolls, and when spinach, for instance, is given, 80 lbs. of spinach. We asked whether the children paid, and were told that those who could afford it paid from 25 to 45 pf. a day. The school is kept open throughout the summer holidays, but no work is done then, and two-thirds of the teachers are away. Although the children are at play for the greater part of the day in term time, and all day in the holidays, the headmaster told us that they gave no trouble. There was not a dirty or untidy child to be seen, nor one with rough manners. They are allowed to play in the light, sandy soil of the forest, much as English children play at the seaside, and we saw the beginning of an elaborate chain of fortresses defended by toy guns and decorated with flowers. We heard a lesson in mental arithmetic given in one of the class-rooms, the boys sitting on one side of the room and the girls on the other; and we found that these young sickly children were admirably taught and well advanced for their age. To be a teacher in one of these open-air schools is hard work, because the strain is never wholly relaxed. All day long, and a German day is very long, the children must be watched and guarded, sheltered from changes in the weather and prevented from over-tiring themselves. Many of them come from poor cramped homes, and to spend the whole summer in the forest more at play than at work makes them most happy. I met Germans who did not approve of the Waldschule who considered it a fantastic extravagant experiment, too heavy for the rate-payers to bear. This is a side of the question that the rate-payers must settle for themselves; but there is no doubt about the results of the venture on the children sent to school in the forest. They get a training that must shape their whole future, moral and physical, a training that changes so many unsound citizens into sound ones every year for the German Empire. If the rate-payers can survive the strain it seems worth while.