r some 30,000 girls will be compelled to attend continuation
schools, where they will be taught cooking, dress-making, laundry
work, house-keeping economy, and for those who wish it, office work.
It will require some training even to pronounce the name of this new
institution, which requires something more than the number of letters
in the alphabet to spell it, for it has this terrifying title:
Maedchenpflicht-fortbildungsschule.

The work in these Pflichtfortbildungsschulen, or compulsory
continuation schools, is practical and thorough. The boys are from
fourteen to eighteen years of age, and are obliged to attend three
hours twice a week. Shopkeepers and others, employing lads coming
under the provisions of the law, are obliged by threat of heavy fines
to send them. The boys pay nothing. There are some 34,000 of such
pupils under one jurisdiction in Berlin, and the cost to the city is
$300,000 annually. The curriculum includes letter-writing, book-
keeping, exchange, bank-credits, checks and bills, the duty of the
business man to his home, to the city, and to his fellow business men,
his legal rights and duties, and, in great detail, all questions of
citizenship. Methods of the banks, stock exchange, and insurance
companies are explained. The business man's relations in detail to the
post-office, the railways, the customs, canals, shipping agencies are
dealt with. The investigation of credits and the general management
from cellar to attic of what we call a "store" are taught, and
lectures are given upon business ethics and family relations and
morals.

In towns where factories are more common than shops there are
schools similar in kind, as at Dortmund, for example, where you may
begin with horse-shoeing in the cellar, and go up through the work of
carpenter, mason, plumber, sign-painter, poster-designer, to the
designing of stained-glass windows and the modelling of animals and
men.

In the strictly agricultural districts of Prussia the number of
courses open to those who work upon the land has steadily increased.
In 1882 there were 559 courses of instruction and 9,228 pupils; in
1902, 1,421 such courses and 20,666 pupils; and in 1908, 3,781 courses
and 55,889 pupils. About five per cent. of the cost of such
instruction, which cost the state 566,599 marks in 1908, is paid by
the fees of the pupils themselves.

To those interested in ways and
means it may serve a purpose to say that the total cost of these
ele