Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 26.djvu/362

348, or it may be, in the technical language of society, to "finish"; to study with private tutors, or in the gymnasium, or the Realschule (real-school). Though many of these students are girls, and many of the objections given also hold good in their case, we shall confine ourselves to boys. Of course, no careful parent would permit his daughter to reside in a foreign country, save under judicious chaperonage; no young girl should be personally subjected to the trials of making her own way among the officials and the managers of pensions in a German city. Some parents place their sons in Leipsic or Berlin, because they have observed that it is the thing to do; others, because they honestly think their children will profit by it—that is, more than they would at school, during the same time, at home. The fame of German schools and teachers may justify the latter view. In scope, purpose, and magnanimity, no schools surpass the German gymnasia and real-schools; and if we take the system throughout the nation and set it beside our school system as a whole, as applied in town and country and in various States, it is far superior, in all that education means, to it and to any other existing system. But, after a residence of over two years in German cities, and after some study of their secondary schools, I am convinced that our best high-schools and academies, public and private, are equal to the best German schools. The question, however, whether a boy at a German school would be better taught in his languages and mathematics, his sciences and his history, is not here pertinent. Grant for the moment that he is better taught; is he, by his German training, better fitted as a man to meet the questions of American life, and to succeed in his calling in America? At the age when his mind is most plastic, when those impressions are received that are to abide by him longest, he is transplanted to a society whose salient features are in reality startlingly unlike those amid which he is to make his way in life. I shall not attempt to decide whether these traits and ideas are preferable to our own; it is enough that they are different. Certain it is, for instance, that a boy in Germany is made unpractical; and that is a fatal quality in an American boy. He is filled with a love of research for its own sake, not for the sake of its bearing upon direct practical results. I should say that this is the chief quality which the boy is sure to get, and which will, in varying degrees, unfit him for the demands of his later work in any calling at home. He will be made impractical and speculative. The Germans are discoverers and recorders of facts, but they are poor at applying them. The boy also loses his sense of the value of time. Where all men, business and professional, move slowly, where it is the rule for the merchant, or the editor, to spend two hours at midday at his dinner and coffee, where "soon" means half a day, and "at once" an hour, the native boy does not suffer if he grows up in an atmosphere of deliberation. But this will not do in Broadway. Again, German boys are overworked. The American boy's school-life is easy com