Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 79.djvu/615

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THE GERMANS AT SCHOOL
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to learn the facts but the methods to find out the true facts from various sources. They are to be brought into contact with the old reports by which the events of the past are transmitted. The knowledge of the languages ought to be gained by practise in conversation, the knowledge of the earth by wandering and living in nature.

This is typically combined in the much-admired institutions of Dr. Lietz, the so-called Landerziehungsheime, educational homes in the country. Lietz was a young enthusiastic teacher who was moved by the ideal of building up healthy, strong, joyful, energetic and judicial men who would be in sympathy with their fellow creatures and understand the needs of the common people, and yet who would be inspired by art and science and technique. He has created in the loveliest regions of Germany three national schools, for the youngest children between seven and twelve in Ilsenburg in the Hartz, the second in Haubinda in Thuringia for the boys between twelve and fifteen and the third in the castle of Bieberstein in the Rhön Mountains for boys between sixteen and twenty. All three places are far removed from the turmoil of the world, and the boys find there a most harmonious interconnection of intellectual training, handicraft work, agricultural activity, sport and inspiring social intercourse between teachers and pupils. It is a delight to see those happy youngsters under conditions in which their natural instincts for out-of-door life and for social companionship, for manual activity and for sport, are so wholesomely satisfied and at the same time where their intellectual development is secured by individualizing training in scholarly method. They learn really to love the literature and the history of their country and to become personally interested in the political and the economic structure of their nation. Their minds are opened to music and art, to religion and morality. Small groups of them undertake walking trips not only into the near neighborhood, but to far-distant parts of the fatherland in a simple camping style. Sometimes even long journeys to Egypt and elsewhere have been undertaken in the vacation time. Truly it is an ideal method to develop a healthy mind in a healthy body. Whether it will become the crystallization point for general educational changes in Germany is, however, more than doubtful. So far these reforms are in an uphill fight. They suffer from that which they feel as an unfairness, namely, from the fact that their schools must lead the boys to the same examinations which the regular school boys have to pass if the pupils are to go over to the university or to any other official career. This demands that in the last years much cramming be introduced and that features be forced on these new boy paradises which seem very foreign to their spirit. They demand, accordingly, new regulations which will give to the new types of schools more appropriate examinations as end points. As long as this is not granted, these schools remain