o speak of fine-tooth-comb education.

I have visited
scores of all sorts of schools all over Germany, from a peasant common
school in Posen up to that last touch in education, the schools in
Charlottenburg, the Schulpforta Academy, and such a private boys'
school as Die Schuelerheim-Kolonie des Arndt-Gymnasiums in the
Gruenewald near Berlin, and the training schools for the military
cadets. Through the courtesy of the authorities I was permitted, when
I wished it, to sit in the class-rooms, and even to put questions to
the boys and girls in the classes. From the small boys and girls
making their first efforts at spelling to the young woman of seventeen
who translated a paragraph of the "Germania" of Tacitus, not into
German but into French, for me (a problem I offered as a good test of
whether I was merely assisting at a prepared exhibition of the prowess
of the class or whether the minds had been trained to independence), I
have looked over a wide field of teaching and learning in Germany. If
that young person was typical of the pupils of this upper girls'
school, there is no doubt of their ability to meet an intellectual
emergency of that kind.

Of one feature of German education one can write without reservation,
and that is the teaching. Everywhere it is good, often superlatively
good, and half a dozen times I have listened to the teaching of a
class in history, in Latin, in German literature, in French
literature, where it was a treat to be a listener. I remember in
particular a class in physical geography, another reading Ovid,
another reading Shakespeare, and another reading Goethe's "Hermann and
Dorothea," where I enjoyed my half-hour, as though I had been
listening to a distinguished lecturer on his darling subject.

We know how little these men and women teachers are paid, but there is
such a flood of intellectual output in Germany that the competition is
ferocious in these callings, and the schools can pick and choose only
from those who have borne the severest tests with the greatest
success. The teaching is so good that it explains in part the amount
of work these poor children are enabled to get through. School begins
at seven in summer, at eight in winter. The course for those intending
to go to the university is nine years; the recitation hours alone
range from twenty-five to thirty-two hours a week; to which must be
added two hours a week of singing and three hours a week of
gymnastics, and this fo