A NEW EDUCATIONAL EXPERIMENT. 1111 
ordinary school they would have grown up useless burdens on 
society ; had they been put into an idiot asylum, they would 
rapidly have degenerated and become idiotic. 
The teaching staff in these schools is entirely composed of men, 
in Germany ; but in England women teach throughout the school, 
as the infinite care and patience that are necessary are supposed 
to be rather feminine than masculine qualities. The number of 
the staff is large in proportion to the number of the pupils, the 
classes never numbering more than thirty, as a great deal of 
individual attention is necessary. 
Curriculum.—For eight years the pupils do as much work as 
is done in the ordinary schools in two years. The hours of 
instruction are twenty-six and twenty-two ones eekly ; but the 
individual lessons are much shorter and much more varied than in 
the ordinary schools. The length of the ordinary ‘ Stunde” is from 
forty-five to fifty-one minutes, but in the special schools few lessons 
are longer than twenty minutes. 
Physical training is very carefully supervised in the big 
gymnasium (Turnhalle) as many of the children have never learnt 
to contro] their muscular movements. Manual training has much 
time devoted to it, and the children delight in carpentering and 
bookbinding, when they can see actual visible results of their 
work ; indeed, so great is the children’s delight in learning “to do” 
that t!.e manual work of the afternoon is made conditional upon 
the conscientious performance of the mental work in the morning. 
An esthetic training is given the children by decorating the 
schoolroom with bright attractive pictures, although the English 
schools are far inferior to the German in this respect. The delight 
of the children in anything in the form of a picture shows how 
necessary such decorations are for the schoolroom. Music and 
singing are largely used to enliven the lessons, and the children 
are most enthusiastically delighted to sing loyal and patriotic 
songs. Luther said, “ Ein schulmeister musz singen kénnen, sonst 
seh ich ihn nicht an”; and although we may not consider that to 
be able to sing is obligatory on all teachers, it should certainly 
be made an essential qualification for a teacher in these schools. 
Object lessons, orlessons in observation (Anschauungs-unterricht) 
as the Germans more correctly call them, play a large part in the 
school curriculum ; and in the lower forms it is often pathetic to 
hear the children attempting to describe what they see ; in fact, 
as Dr. Shuttleworth truly observed, the method pursued with 
these children may be described as a continuation of the Kinder- 
garten. The great object of the teacher should be to keep always 
in close touch with the concrete. Arithmetic is the great 
difficulty, these children finding problems, even the simplest, 
quite beyond them at first, though before they leave school they 
can understand and work easy problems in fractions. 
