6 12 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 



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 Gym- 

 nasiums for women. The German community is decidedly unwilling 

 to gather in one schoolroom boys and girls beyond the age of the ele- 

 mentary 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 Real- 

 schule, 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 power- 

 less 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 out- 

 side 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 educa- 

 tional 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 work- 



