At several of the universities evening extension lectures are given, an innovation first tried at Leipsic, where more than seven thousand persons paid small fees to attend the lectures in a recent year.
If one considers the range of instruction from the Volkschulen and Fortbildungsschulen up through the skeleton list I have mentioned to the universities, and then on beyond that to the thousands still engaged as students in the commerce and industry of Germany, as, for example, the technically employed men in the Krupp Works at Essen, or the Color Works at Elberfeld, to mention two of hundreds, it is seen that Germany is gone over with a veritable fine-tooth comb of education. There is not only nothing like it, there is nothing comparable to it in the world. If training the minds of a population were the solution of the problems of civilization, they are on the way to such solution in Germany. Unfortunately there is no such easy way out of our troubles for Germany or for any other nation. Some of us will live to see this fetich of regimental instruction of everybody disappear as astrology has disappeared. There is a Japanese proverb which runs, "The bottom of lighthouses is very dark."
As early as 1717 Frederick William I in an edict commanded parents to send their children to school, daily in summer, twice a week in winter. Frederick the Great at the close of the Seven Years' War, 1764, insisted again upon compulsory school attendance, and prescribed books, studies, and discipline. At the beginning of the nineteenth century began a great change in the primary schools due to the influence of Pestalozzi, and in the secondary schools owing to the efforts of Herder, Frederic August Wolf, William Humboldt, and Sünern. Humboldt was the Prussian minister of education for sixteen months. In 1809 he sent a memorial to the King, urging the establishment and endowment of a university in Berlin. He used his authority and his great influence to further higher and secondary education, and fixed the main lines of action which were followed for a century. He hoped that a liberal education of his countrymen would make for both an intellectual and moral regeneration, and emancipate the people from their sluggish obedience to conventionality. The schools then were part of the ecclesiastical organization and have never ceased to be so wholly, and until recently the title of the Prussian minister has been: "Minister of Ecclesiastical Affairs, Instruction, and Medical Affairs." That part of the minister's title, "Medical Affairs," has within the last few months been eliminated.