1108 PROCEEDINGS OF SECTION J. 
that education is the best investment they can make for their 
children. This is proved by a study of the School Registers, in 
which there is no method of marking a late attendance, and which 
are only occasionally opened to mark the absence of a pupil, such 
absence never being due to a trivial cause. 
If the universal appreciation of the value of education is a 
striking characteristic, so is the deeper meaning given to the words. 
“Nicht fiir die Schule, sondern fiir das Leben,” is the motto of the 
educational code, and the opportunities afforded by the municipal 
councils and the Government for self improvement and culture 
are not confined to the term of school-life nor limited within the 
school’s walls. 
Every small town has its theatre, which is made at once a 
means of literary and moral training, as Lessing pleaded a century 
ago that it might be. Good music is accessible to all, and admirable 
museums and libraries. 
In the method of teaching, the Germans differ from us funda- 
mentally. All formal instruction is based upon a sound knowledge 
of theory ; none but trained teachers are admitted to teach in either 
the public or private schools. Such teachers naturally realise that 
their duty is rather to help on the dull and backward children than 
to spur on the sharp and clever ones, following the precept of 
Mulcaster (1531-1611.):—‘“ Wherefore I would wish the wittier 
child less upon the spur, and either the longer kept from learning 
for fear of turning his edge as a too sharp knife, or the slenderer 
kept at it for fear of surfeit in one hungering to have it.” 
The teachers are aided in their efforts to educate rather than 
merely to impart information by the enlightened system of inspec- 
tion which exists in Northern Germany. The Inspectors have all 
been teachers, and judge of the pupils and the school, not by an 
annual examination, “for the sake of which three hundred and 
sixty-four days of the year are sacrificed to one,” according to an 
English elementary school-master, but by a series of visits and 
lessons given to the children throughout the year. 
I must apologise for the somewhat lengthy introduction, but the 
“Special Schools ” owe their origin and development to the great 
care that is taken of the individual child, and the careful watch 
that is kept upon his intellectual progress—not by testing the 
amount of information he has acquired, but by ascertaining how 
far he has assimilated what he has been taught, whether it be 
more or less than the prescribed amount being a matter of minor 
importance. 
These special schools of Germany —Hilfs-schulen astheyare called 
there—were founded for the reception of those children who were 
intellectually incapable of doing the ordinary school work, and to 
whom competition with normally gifted children instead of proving 
a spur, became a deadening and paralysing influence. 
