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if it is to be a preparatory school, not only for military education,
but for life generally. It sends children out into the world with
undeveloped reasoning faculties, and equipped with the barest elements
of knowledge, and thus makes them not only void of self-reliance, but
easy victims of all the corrupting influences of social life. As a
matter of fact, the mind and reasoning faculties of the national
schoolboy are developed for the first time by his course of instruction
as a recruit.

It is obviously not my business to indicate the paths to such a reform.
I will only suggest the points which seem to me the most important from
the standpoint of a citizen and a soldier.

First and foremost, the instruction must be more individual. The number
of teachers, accordingly, must be increased, and that of scholars
diminished. It is worth while considering in this connection the
feasibility of beginning school instruction at the age of eight years.
Then all teaching must be directed, more than at present, to the object
of developing the children's minds, and formal religious instruction
should only begin in due harmony with intellectual progress. Finally,
the _Realien,_ especially the history of our own country, should claim
more attention, and patriotic feelings should be encouraged in every
way; while in religious instruction the moral influence of religion
should be more prominent than the formal contents. The training of the
national school teacher must be placed on a new basis. At present it
absolutely corresponds to the one-sided and limited standpoint of the
school itself, and does not enable the teachers to develop the minds and
feelings of their pupils. It must be reckoned a distinct disadvantage
for the upgrowing generation that all instruction ends at the age of
fourteen, so that, precisely at the period of development in which the
reasoning powers are forming, the children are thrown back on themselves
and on any chance influences. In the interval between school life and
military service the young people not only forget all that they learnt,
perhaps with aptitude, in the national school, but they unthinkingly
adopt distorted views of life, and in many ways become brutalized from a
lack of counteracting ideals.

A compulsory continuation school is therefore an absolute necessity of
the age. It is also urgently required from the military standpoint. Such
a school, to be fruitful in results, must endeavour, no