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 III

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