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Show Germany's School Teachers I have visited scores of all sorts of schools all over Germany, from a peasant common school in Poscn up to ' Hint last touch in education, the schools in Charlottenburg, the Schulp- i forta academy, and such a private boys' school as Die Schulerhelm-Kol- onio de8 Arndt-Gymuashmis in the ' .Grunewald near Berlin, and the train-ling train-ling schools for the military cadets., i Through the courtesy of the author- ilies I was permitted, when 1 wished, i 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 seven, teen who translated a paragraph of the "Germania" of Tacitus, not into German, but into French, for me fa problem 1 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 thai young person was typical of the pupils pu-pils of this upper girls' school, there is no doubt of their ability to meet an intellectual cmorgcnc ol that kind. Of one failure of German edtica-I edtica-I lion one can write without rescra-tion, rescra-tion, and that is the teaching Everywhere Ev-erywhere it is good, often superlatively superla-tively good, and half a dozen times I have listened to the teaching of a class in histo-i, in Latin, in German Ger-man literature, in French literature, where it was a treat to be a listener. I remember in particular a class in phvslcal geograpln. anothpr leading 0id. another reading Shakespeare, 'and another roadinir Goethe s 'Her j mann and Dorothea, whore I pijo -ed my Malf-houi as though I bad TBtgptmiui-rii ii hum i ii i iB.'niiiH niPTm ' J been listening to a distinguished lecturer lec-turer on hl3 darling subject. We know how little those men and women teachers are paid, but there I fs such a flood of Intellectual output i In Germany that the competition is ferocious in these callings, and the I schools can pick and choose only from those who have home the severest tests with the greatest success. The leaching is so good that it explains i in part the amount of work these poor children are enabled to get through ! From -'Germany and the Germans From an American Point of View," by Price Collier, in Scribner. |