7IO PRACTICAL EDUCATION. 



or commercial classes until he or she has f|ualified bv attendance 

 at a PflicJitfortbildniuisschiilc/' 



Stringent regulations exist through which both employe 

 and employer can be punished for contravention by fine or im- 

 prisonment. It may be that a conscrij^t army has rendered 

 possible the conscript continuation class and the iron discipline 

 of the system; it began forty years ago. and has spread through 

 the whole country as a nationally accepted system of education 

 not, I think, because of conscription, but because it equips the 

 ordinary individual with a vocational efficiencv initiallv unex- 

 pected. 



There is one great difference in the working of the systems 

 as between, roughly, north and south (Germany. In the south 

 trades workshops are fitted in buildings specially provided for 

 vocational teaching, while in the north the teaching is by theory 

 illustrated by stereotyped samples and diagrams mounted on 

 cards, the instruction being given by academically trained 

 teachers from text-books prepared by a committee of each trade 

 concerned, and in a class-room of the sort found in the older 

 type elementary school. The older directors responsible for this 

 system hold that the theory of the trade is all that need be im- 

 parted when the commercial shop ])ractice actually engages the 

 remaining time of the pupil. Tiiis has been a common argument 

 in South Africa; here are three serious objections raised by Ger- 

 man teachers themselves. The first and serious weakness is the 

 impossibility of maintaining the interest of the pupil owing to 

 the inelasticity and woodenness of the examples and ])roblems that 

 must be used in the teaching, this residts in a deadening of the 

 interest of the pupil during a particularly sensitive period of 

 the child's education. The second and very serious weakness 

 is the waste of time owing to an insistence upon obsolete teach- 

 ing methods ; for example, an apprentice class for dental 

 mechanics is expected to be able to recite by rote the constituent 

 proportions of certain teeth fillings, the chemical action that 

 occurs in each, and how the work is done. Again, hygiene is 

 supposed to be imparted by learning off certain rules upon the 

 science and an examination of some wall pictures. The third 

 and very serious weakness is that the lessons given often do not 

 cover the individual practical difficulties that the apprentices 

 meet with in their work ; the difficulties referred to are those 

 that depend, as a rule, upon the learner ; but there are others, in 

 addition, due to the fact that the apprentice may be employed by 

 a master who is acting as a sub-contractor, and therefore the 

 work done in his shop does not cover the whole practice of the 

 trade. This last point became crucial as soon as the academi- 

 cally trained teacher was replaced by a qualified tradesman 

 instructor, which usually occurred in the third or last year of 

 the course, and because the apprentice often outran the teacher 



* Compulsory Continuation Ordinary School Classes in the afternoon. 



