Home Life in Germany - Mrs. Alfred Sidgwick

Скачать книгу

of a nine years' course in one of the classical schools. Even to-day you may hear German men argue that women should not be admitted to universities because they have had no classical training. Helene Lange was the first to prove that even without early training women can prepare themselves for an academic career. Her experiment led to the establishment of Gymnasialkurse in many German cities; and even to the admission of girls in some few cases to boys' Gymnasium schools.

      To-day Helene Lange and her associates are contending with the schoolmasters, who desire to keep the management of girls' schools in their own hands. She calls the Höhere Töchterschule the failure of German school organisation, and she says that the difference of view taken by men and women teachers as to the proper work of girls' schools makes it most difficult to come to an understanding. Consciously or not, men form an ideal of what they want and expect of women, and try to educate them up to it; while women think of the claims life may make on a girl, and desire the full development of her powers. "The Higher Daughter," she says, "must vanish, and her place must be taken by the girl who has been thoroughly prepared for life, who can stand on her own feet if circumstances require it, or who brings with her as housewife the foundations of further self-development, instead of the pretentiousness of the half educated." In one of her many articles on the subject of school reform she points to three directions where reform is needed. What she says about the teaching of history is so characteristic of her views and of the modern movement in Germany, that I think the whole passage is worth translation:—

      "All those subjects that help to make a woman a better citizen must be taken more seriously," she says. "It can no longer be the proper aim of history teaching to foster and strengthen in women a sentimental attachment to her country and its national character: its aim must be to give her the insight that will enable her to understand the forces at work, and ultimately play an active part in them. Many branches of our social life await the work of women, civic philanthropy to begin with; and as our public life becomes more and more constitutional, it demands from the individual both a ripe insight into the good of the community and a living sense of duty in regard to its destiny; and, on the other hand, the foundations of this insight and sense of duty must be in our times more and more laid by the mother, since the father is often entirely prevented by his work from sharing in the education of his children. Therefore, both on her own account and in consideration of the task before her, a woman just as much as a man should understand and take a practical interest in public life, and it is the business of the school to see that she does so. Over and over again those who are trying to reform girls' schools insist that history teaching should lead the student to understand the present time; that it should recognise those economic conditions on which the history of the world, especially in our day, depends in so great a measure; that it should pay attention not only to dates and events, but also to the living process of civilisation, since it is only from the latter inquiry that we can arrive at the principles of individual effort in forwarding social life."

      Nowadays in Germany Helene Lange is considered one of the "Moderates," but it will be seen from the above quotation that she has travelled far from the old ideals which invested women with many beautiful qualities, but not with the sense and knowledge required of useful public citizens. She proceeds in the same article to say that scientific and mathematical teaching should reach a higher standard in girls' schools; and thirdly, that certain branches of psychology, physiology, and hygiene should receive greater attention, because a woman is a better wife and mother when she fulfils her duties with understanding instead of by mere instinct. Nor will education on this higher plane deprive women of any valuable feminine virtues if it is carried out in the right way. But to this end women must direct it, and in great measure take it into their own hands. She would not shut men out of girls' schools, but she would place women in supreme authority there, and give them the lion's share of the work.

      It seems to the English onlooker that this contest can only end in one way, and that if the women of Germany mean to have the control of girls' schools they are bound to get it. Some of the evils of the present system lie on the surface. "It is a fact," said a schoolmaster, speaking lately at a conference—"it is a fact that a more intimate, spiritual, and personal relationship is developed between a schoolgirl and her master than between a schoolgirl and her mistress." This remark, evidently made in good faith, was received with hilarity by a large mixed audience of teachers; and when one reflects on the unbridled sentiment of some "higher daughters" one sees where it must inevitably find food under the present anomalous state of things. But the schoolmaster's argument is the argument brought forward by many men against the reforms desired by Helene Lange and her party. They insist that girls would deteriorate if they were withdrawn throughout their youth from masculine scholarship and masculine authority in school. They talk of the emasculation of the staff as a future danger. They do not seem to talk of their natural reluctance to cede important posts to women, but this must, of course, strengthen their pugnacity and in some cases colour their views.

      Meanwhile many parents prefer to send their daughters to one of the private schools that have a woman at the head, and where most of the teaching is done by women; or to a Stift, a residential school of the conventual type, which may be either Protestant or Catholic. A girl who had spent some years at a well-known Protestant Stift described her school life to me as minutely as possible, and it sounded so like the life in a good English boarding-school thirty years ago that it is difficult to pick out points of differences. That only means, of course, that the differences were subtle and not apparent in rules and time-tables. The girls wore a school uniform, were well fed and taught, strictly looked after, taken out for walks and excursions, allowed a private correspondence, shown how to mend their clothes, made to keep their rooms tidy, encouraged in piety and decorum. In these strenuous times it sounds a little old-fashioned, and as a matter of fact a school of this kind fits a girl for a sheltered home but not for the open road. For everyone concerned about the education of women the interesting spectacle in Germany to-day is the campaign being carried on by Helene Lange and her party, the support they receive from the official as well as from the unofficial world, and the progress they make year by year to gain their ends.

       Table of Contents

      THE EDUCATION OF THE POOR

      There are no people in the world who need driving to school less than the Germans. There are no people in the world who set so high a value on knowledge. In the old days, when they lived with Jove in the clouds, they valued knowledge solely for its own sake, and did not trouble much about its practical use in the world. It is absurd to say, as people often do now, that this spirit is dead in the nation. You cannot be long in the society of Germans without recognising that it survives wherever the stress of modern life leaves room for it. You see that when a German makes money his sons constantly enter the learned and the artistic professions with his full approval, though they are most unlikely to make a big income in this way. You are told by people who work amongst the poor, that parents will make any sacrifices year after year in order to send a boy to one of the higher schools. You know that the Scotsmen who live on oatmeal while they acquire learning have their counterparts in the German universities, where many a student would not dine at all if private or organised charity did not give him a dinner so many days a week. Sometimes you have heard it said of such and such a great German, that he was so poor when he was young that he had to accept these free dinners given in every German university town to penniless students. The fact would be remembered, but it would never count against a man in Germany. The dollar is not almighty there.

      To say, therefore, that education is compulsory throughout the empire is not to say that it is unpopular. A teacher in an elementary school was once telling me how particular the authorities were that every child, even the poorest, should come to school properly clothed and shod. "For instance," she said, "if a child comes to school in house-shoes he is sent straight home again." "But do the parents mind that?" I asked from my English point of view, for the teacher was speaking of people who in England would live in slums and care little whether their children were educated or not. But in Germany even the poorest of the poor do care,

Скачать книгу