As a means of cultivating abstract thinking--i. e., the power of understanding and reasoning--Hegel exalts again, in opposition to the preceding reformers, the study of logic and grammar, especially the grammar of the ancient languages. “The value of grammatical study,” he asserts, “can scarcely be overestimated, for it forms the beginning of logical culture, a fact, however, that appears to be almost overlooked.” He does not even hesitate to say that “careful grammatical study is one of the most noble and universal means of culture” (3: pp. 155-156). Various branches of philosophy, including the elements of religion, law, ethics, and psychology, are also prescribed for the gymnasium. Voice culture, public speaking, and the art of reading are mentioned as the important factors in education. Instruction in military drill is strongly advocated, as training alertness and exact ideo-motor reaction; and consequently as “the most direct way of counteracting a lazy absent-mindedness”; as the common ground of pursuit which “best serves in leveling the partition wall that we build around our callings”; finally and preëminently as “a reminder that every man, whatever his position, should be ready to defend his fatherland and his prince” (3: pp. 153-154). In the notion of the school, too, Hegel takes us back to the official and orthodox standpoint. It is simply preparation for the future life of the matured man. It is a mere organ through which the essentials of the acquired culture of the race are bequeathed to the new generation. Nothing more can or should be hoped from it. “The sciences are not enlarged by the school.... Its knowledge is old property of the race. The work of the school has not its perfect end in itself. It lays but the foundation for the possibility of other work, that of real performance.... This preparation, this culture, can never be ‘finished.’ Only a certain stage of it may be attained” (3: p. 147). School is not, like a Froebelian kindergarten, the children’s own world. “It educates the individual to participate in the world life”; it is “a secluded inner preparation.” This secluded period of mere apprenticeship not only lacks such organic relation to the larger life of the community or the warm, intimate air of family life, as the school in the Pestalozzian conception, but it lacks, unlike the people’s school of Fichte’s ideal, even its own completeness and independence. Hegel complacently admits that “school life is dispassionate; it lacks the higher interest and earnestness of real life.” But, just the same, it is the necessary and best preparation for life. He disapproves “the maxim that children are early to be brought out into society.” For “men of world-wide fame have come from the narrow gate of the monastery; while, on the contrary, men who have grown-up amid all the externalities of life unfold little fruit of inner worth” (3: pp. 147-149).