Attendance at continuation schools is now compulsory on boys and girls
for three years after leaving the elementary school, where they have
had eight years steady education. They must attend from four to six
hours weekly; instruction is free, and is given in the evening, when
the working day is over. Certain classes of the community are free,
but about 30,000 students attend these schools in Berlin. The subjects
taught are too many to enumerate. They comprise modern languages,
history, law, painting, music, mathematics, and various domestic arts,
such as ironing and cooking. More boys than girls attend these
schools, as girls are more easily exempt. It is presumably not
considered so necessary for them as for their brothers to continue
their education after the age of fourteen.
One of the most interesting experiments being made in Germany at
present is the "open air" school, established for sickly children
during the summer months. The first one was set up by the city of
Charlottenberg at the suggestion of their _Schulrat_ and their school
doctor, and it is now being imitated in other parts of Germany. From
Charlottenberg the electric cars take you right into the pine forest,
far beyond the last houses of the growing city. The soil here is loose
and sandy, and the air in summer so soft that it wants strength and
freshness. But as far out as this it is pure, and the medical men must
deem it healing, for they have set up three separate ventures close
together amongst the pine trees. One belongs to the Society of the Red
Cross, and here sick and consumptive women come with their children
for the day, and are waited on by the Red Cross sisters. We saw some
of them lying about on reclining chairs, and some, less sickly, were
playing croquet. The second establishment is for children who are not
able to do any lessons, children who have been weeded out by the
school doctor because they are backward and sickly. There are a
hundred and forty children in this school, and there is a crêche with
twenty beds attached to it for babies and very young children. One
airy room with two rows of neat beds was for rickety children.
The third and largest of the settlements was the _Waldschule_, open
every day, Sundays included, from the end of April to the middle of
October, and educating two hundred and forty delicate children chosen
from the elementary schools of Charlottenberg. We arrived there just
as the children were going to sit down to their afternoon meal of
bread and milk, and each child was fetching its own mug hanging on a
numbered hook. The meals in fine weather are taken at long tables in
the open air. When it rains they are served in big shelters closed on
three sides. Dotted about the forest there were mushroom-shaped
shelters with seats and tables beneath them, sufficient cover in
slight showers; and there were well lighted, well aired class-rooms,
where the children are taught for twenty-five minutes at a time.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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