Germany and the Germans from an American Point of ViewCollier, Price
History
Germany and the Germans from an American Point of View
Collier, Price
Germany; National characteristics, German
While the population of Germany has increased 1.4 per cent. in the last
year, the number of students has increased 4.6 per cent. and of the
total number 4.4 per cent. are women. Since the founding of the empire
the population has increased from 40,000,000 to 65,000,000, but the
number of students has increased from 18,000 to 60,000. The teaching
staffs in the universities number 3,400, and in the technical
high-schools 753, or, roughly, there are, in the higher-education
department of Germany, nearly 90,000 persons engaged; as these figures
do not include officials and many unattached teachers and students
indirectly connected with the universities. There are in addition
agricultural high-schools, agricultural institutes, and technical
schools such as veterinary high-schools, schools of mining, forestry,
architecture and building, commercial schools, schools of art and
industry; a naval school at Kiel; a colonial institute at Hamburg,
with sixty professors and tutors, where men are trained for colonial
careers, and which serves also the purpose of distributing information
of all kinds regarding the colonies; there are 400 schools which
prepare for a business career, with 50,000 pupils, and the Socialists
in Berlin maintain an academy for the instruction of their paid
secretaries and organizers in the rudiments and controversial points
of socialism, military academies at Berlin and Munich, besides some 50
schools of navigation, and 20 military and cadet institutions. There
are also courses of lectures, given under the auspices of the German
foreign office, to instruct candidates for the consular service in the
commercial and industrial affairs of Germany.
At several of the
universities evening extension lectures are given, an innovation first
tried at Leipsic, where more than seven thousand persons paid small
fees to attend the lectures in a recent year.
If one considers the
range of instruction from the Volkschulen and Fortbildungsschulen up
through the skeleton list I have mentioned to the universities, and
then on beyond that to the thousands still engaged as students in the
commerce and industry of Germany, as, for example, the technically
employed men in the Krupp Works at Essen, or the Color Works at
Elberfeld, to mention two of hundreds, it is seen that Germany is gone
over with a veritable fine-tooth comb of education. There is not only
nothing like it, there is nothing comparable to it in the world. If
training the minds of a population were the solution of the problems
of civilization, they are on the way to such solution in Germany.
Unfortunately there is no such easy way out of our troubles for
Germany or for any other nation. Some of us will live to see this
fetich of regimental instruction of everybody disappear as astrology
has disappeared. There is a Japanese proverb which runs, "The bottom
of lighthouses is very dark."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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