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 reform if it is to be a preparatory school, not only for military education, but for life generally.  It sends children out into the world with undeveloped reasoning faculties, and equipped with the barest elements of knowledge, and thus makes them not only void of self-reliance, but easy victims of all the corrupting influences of social life.  As a matter of fact, the mind and reasoning faculties of the national schoolboy are developed for the first time by his course of instruction as a recruit.

It is obviously not my business to indicate the paths to such a reform.  I will only suggest the points which seem to me the most important from the standpoint of a citizen and a soldier.