We must not therefore be content to educate up for the army a physically healthy set of young men by elevating the social conditions and the whole method of life of our people, but we must also endeavour to promote their spiritual development in every way.  The means for doing so is the school.  Military education under the present-day conditions, which are continually becoming more severe, can only realize its aims satisfactorily if a groundwork has been laid for it in the schools, and an improved preliminary training has been given to the raw material.

The national school is not sufficient for this requirement.  The general regulations which settle the national school system in Prussia date from the year 1872, and are thus forty years old, and do not take account of the modern development which has been so rapid of late years.  It is only natural that a fundamental opposition exists between them and the essentials of military education.  Present-day military education requires complete individualization and a conscious development of manly feeling; in the national school everything is based on teaching in classes, and there is no distinction between the sexes.  This is directly prescribed by the rules.

In the army the recruits are taught under the superintendence of the superiors by specially detached officers and selected experienced non-commissioned officers; and even instruction is given them in quite small sections; while each one receives individual attention from the non-commissioned officers of his section and the higher superior officers.  In a school, on the contrary, the master is expected to teach as many as eighty scholars at a time; in a school with two teachers as many as 120 children are divided into two classes.  A separation of the sexes is only recommended in a school of several classes.  As a rule, therefore, the instruction is given in common.  It is certain that, under such conditions, no insight into the personality of the individual is possible.  All that is achieved is to impart more or less mechanically and inefficiently a certain amount of information in some branch of knowledge, without any consideration of the special dispositions of boys and girls, still less of individuals.

Such a national school can obviously offer no preparation for a military education.  The principles which regulate the teaching in the two places are quite different.  That is seen in the whole tendency of the instruction.

The military education aims at training the moral personality to independent thought and action, and at the same time rousing patriotic feelings among the men.  Instruction in a sense of duty and in our national history thus takes a foremost place by the side of professional teaching.  Great attention is given to educate each individual in logical reasoning and in the clear expression of his thoughts.