in a German girls' school.
The whole question of women's education is in a ferment in Germany at
present, and though everyone interested is ready to talk of it,
everyone tells you that it is impossible to foresee exactly what
reforms are coming. There are to be new schools established, _Lyceen_
and _Ober-Lyceen_, and _Ober-Lyceen_ will prepare for matriculation.
When girls have matriculated from one of these schools they will be
ready for the university, and will work for the same examinations as
men. Baden was the first German State that allowed women to
matriculate at its universities. It did so in 1900, and in 1903
Bavaria followed suit. In 1905 there were eighty-five women at the
universities who had matriculated in Germany; but there are hundreds
working at the universities without matriculating first. At present
the professors are free to admit women or to exclude them from their
classes; but the right of exclusion is rarely exercised. Before long
it will presumably be a thing of the past.
An Englishwoman residing at Berlin, and engaged in education, told me
that in her opinion no German woman living had done as much for her
countrywomen as Helene Lange, the president of the _Allgemeine
deutsche Frauenverein_. Nineteen years ago she began the struggle that
is by no means over, the struggle to secure a better education for
women and a greater share in its control. In English ears her aim
will sound a modest one, but English girls' schools are not entirely
in the hands of men, with men for principals and men to teach the
higher classes. She began in 1887 by publishing a pamphlet that made a
great sensation, because it demanded, what after a mighty tussle was
conceded, women teachers for the higher classes in girls' schools, and
for these women an academic education. In 1890 she founded, together
with Auguste Schmidt and Marie Loeper-Housselle, the _Allgemeine
deutsche Lehrerinnen-Verein_, which now has 80 branches and 17,000
members. But the pluckiest thing she did was to fight Prussian
officialdom and win. In 1889 she opened _Real-Kurse für Mädchen und
Frauen_, classes where women could work at subjects not taught in
girls' schools, Latin for instance, and advanced mathematics; for the
State in Germany has always decided how much as well as how little
women may learn. It would not allow people as ignorant as Squeers to
keep a school because it offered an easy livelihood. It organised
women's education carefully and thoroughly in the admirable German
way; but it laid down the law from A to Z, which is also the German
way. When, therefore, Helene Lange opened her classes for women, the
officials came to her and said that she was doing an illegal thing.
She replied that her students were not schoolgirls under the German
school laws, but grown-up women free to learn what they needed and
desired. The officials said that an old law of 1837 would empower them
to close the classes by force if Helene Lange did not do so of her own
accord.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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