o impart to
them subtle religious ideas. Yet every Saturday the appointed passages
of Scripture (the Pericopes) are explained to six-year-old children.

Religious instruction proper ought to begin in the middle standard. Up
to that point the teacher should be content, from the religious
standpoint, to work on the child's imagination and feelings with the
simplest ideas of the Deity, but in other respects to endeavour to
awaken and encourage the intellectual life, and make it able to grasp
loftier conceptions. The national school stands in total contradiction
to this intellectual development. This is in conformity to regulations,
for the same children who read the Bible independently are only to be
led to "an approximate comprehension of those phenomena which are daily
around them." In the course of eight years they learn a smattering of
reading, writing, and ciphering.[A] It is significant of the knowledge
of our national history which the school imparts that out of sixty-three
recruits of one company to whom the question was put who Bismarck was,
not a single one could answer. That the scholars acquire even a general
idea of their duties to the country and the State is quite out of the
question. It is impossible to rouse the affection and fancy of the
children by instruction in history, because the two sexes are taught in
common. One thing appeals to the heart of boys, another to those of
girls; and, although I consider it important that patriotic feelings
should be inculcated among girls, since as mothers they will transmit
them to the family, still the girls must be influenced in a different
way from the boys. When the instruction is common to both, the treatment
of the subject by the teacher remains neutral and colourless. It is
quite incomprehensible how such great results are expected in the
religious field when so little has been achieved in every other field.

This pedantic school has wandered far indeed from the ideal that
Frederick the Great set up. He declared that the duty of the State was
"to educate the young generation to independent thinking and
self-devoted love of country."

[Footnote A: Recently a boy was discharged from a well-known national
school as an exceptionally good scholar, and was sent as well qualified
to the office of a Head Forester. He showed that he could not copy
correctly, to say nothing of writing by himself.]

Our national school of to-day needs, then, searching and thorough refo