Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 79.djvu/616

612 confined to narrow circles. But more important perhaps is the second fact. The Germans feel on the whole very unwilling to give their sons and daughters out of the house, if the education can possibly be obtained in the neighborhood. The system of the American academies and boarding schools is contrary to all German traditions. Especially in the large cities in which the Americans are most readily inclined to send their children away for the educational years, the Germans would least think of separating the youth from the home.

It may seem surprising to American observers that in the abundance of educational schemes which recent times have ripened in Germany nowhere has a serious movement toward coeducation been started. In a very modest way it has been forced on the communities in those places in which girls want to be prepared for the university but where no special Gymnasium classes for girls have been arranged. Just these exceptional cases however hasten the establishment of special Gymnasiums for women. The German community is decidedly unwilling to gather in one schoolroom boys and girls beyond the age of the elementary school. They do not object to the coeducational instruction of small children in rural schools. This is a frequent practise. Nor do they object to the comradeship of young men and women on the level of the highest university work. But in the broad period of the development of adolescence they believe in strict bieducation. Even when the material of study is the same, differentiation of method is demanded and German pedagogues decidedly object to women teachers for grown-up boys. The fact is that the new girls' school plans, even where they lead to exactly the same goal as the Gymnasium or the Realschule, distribute the material in a characteristically different way from the program of the boys' schools. They acknowledge the psychological laws of the different rhythm of the development of the two sexes. The well-known suggestion that the boys become refined and the girls strengthened through the presence of the other sex is the more powerless since the educators feel justified in reporting that even America, where the experiment has been tried most extensively, is in a stage of reaction against the coeducational enthusiasm.

Whoever looks at the free play of educational energies in Germany's social organism is probably most impressed by the strong activity outside of the regular day schools. Instruction for those who go to school because they have not yet entered a practical life work is furnished everywhere in the world, but no country shows such systematic educational planning for those who have left school and are at work in business or in factories, in agriculture or in any other calling. The splendid development which this type of pedagogical influence has found in recent times has been to a high degree due to a reaction against grave misuses in the past. In early times, to be sure, the boy who left the primary school was under the strict control of the master in the