Page:The Yankee and the Teuton in Wisconsin.djvu/70

 and special training for the work of the schoolroom. Such a statement could not be made at that time about Massachusetts, where popular education was already two hundred years old, nor could it be made with equal confidence of other German countries, though several of these approximated the Prussian standard and most of them were earnestly promoting education along the same lines and by the use of similar means.

We must therefore regard the generation of the German exodus from which Wisconsin profited so largely in the later 1840's and the 1850's, as almost universally literate and usually well grounded in the rudiments of an education. The intelligent, reading, writing, and slow but careful figuring German peasant immigrants constituted the best testimonial to the efficacy of German systems of instruction for the common people. The Gymnasia, the real Schule, the universities, sent forth representatives of the highest German culture to honor the learned professions, the literary, philosophical, and scientific circles of America.

On the basis of formal school instruction alone, the historian of early Wisconsin would be compelled to assign first place in social fitness to the immigrants from Germany. Neither the Irish, the English, nor even the Yankee pioneers on the average had enjoyed as thorough a training as had Prussians, Saxons, Hessians, or Badeners. Yet, school training is never all there is of education, and it may constitute but a small portion of it. No one questions that the social character of Prussian and other German peasants was far higher in 1840 than it had been in 1800, and this was due to a variety of causes, of which schooling was only one. In part it was due to the abolition of serfdom, in part to the reorganization of municipal life; also, largely to the religious agitation of the period, to the movements for political reform, and especially