he 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.

LESSONS
SUBJECT 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 8-1/2
Handfertigkeit 3
----
502-1/2 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 Ca