Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 26.djvu/363

Rh pared with the steady drill of the gymnasium and real-school, and he must compete with students who not only seem proof against poor ventilation and poor food, but are used to hard labor and short vacations, and he must do it in a foreign tongue. All gymnasium students must do work during the short summer vacation, requiring not less than one hour, and not more than two hours, daily. The course of the gymnasium lasts nine years. During the first seven years, there are ten hours per week of recitation in Latin, and, throughout the last seven years, six hours per week of Greek. The number of hours of recitation per week can not exceed thirty-two, and it can not be less than twenty-seven. There are no Saturday holidays, so that the time spent in recitation at school averages five hours a day. The law permits but ten weeks of vacation in the year: four weeks beginning on the third Saturday in July, two weeks at Christmas, two at Easter, one at Whitsuntide, and one at the end of the summer semester. The morning session begins at eight o'clock, and lasts until twelve, when there is a recess of one hour. Lessons are then continued until six o'clock. This is the plan every day, save Saturday and Wednesday, when the afternoon session is omitted. Compared with the work of an American high-school, this is stupendous, and it must tend to endanger the health of any pupil.

A symptom of overwork among German boys is short-sightedness and other diseases of the eye; this is so general that most travelers note it as a national characteristic. Not only do the majority of men who have studied wear glasses, but it is safe to say that a third of the school-boys wear them. This is said to be due to the intricacies of the German type; but poor ventilation, close application, and bad lighting can not fail also to weaken the eyes, and the American boy escapes none of the primitiveness of German home and school life.

Another loss which our typical boy suffers is in his Americanism. I am not fully prepared to say that in many respects this loss is not a gain, if you consider the boy as a sort of ideal abstraction; but, as regards his patriotism, his working power as a force in the community where he is to live, and his success in life, it is an actual loss. Imperceptibly he comes to regard the peasant, the servant, the hand-worker, as an inferior being. The sight of women helping dogs draw carts, or sawing wood in the streets, soon fails to shock him. In the larger sense he ceases to be a democrat; the grown man resists the forces which inevitably stamp the school-boy. And in the narrower sense, touching manners, personal habits, and speech, the boy is more markedly affected, and in ways which at home may lay him open to the charge of snobbery or pedantry. Although the rules of the gymnasium forbid beer-drinking and smoking, and teachers are responsible for the observance of these rules, the very atmosphere of a German town is so redolent of beer and smoke that the boy acquires a laxness regarding these habits which makes him out of place, and puts him at