First and foremost, the instruction must be more individual.  The number of teachers, accordingly, must be increased, and that of scholars diminished.  It is worth while considering in this connection the feasibility of beginning school instruction at the age of eight years.  Then all teaching must be directed, more than at present, to the object of developing the children’s minds, and formal religious instruction should only begin in due harmony with intellectual progress.  Finally, the Realien, especially the history of our own country, should claim more attention, and patriotic feelings should be encouraged in every way; while in religious instruction the moral influence of religion should be more prominent than the formal contents.  The training of the national school teacher must be placed on a new basis.  At present it absolutely corresponds to the one-sided and limited standpoint of the school itself, and does not enable the teachers to develop the minds and feelings of their pupils.  It must be reckoned a distinct disadvantage for the upgrowing generation that all instruction ends at the age of fourteen, so that, precisely at the period of development in which the reasoning powers are forming, the children are thrown back on themselves and on any chance influences.  In the interval between school life and military service the young people not only forget all that they learnt, perhaps with aptitude, in the national school, but they unthinkingly adopt distorted views of life, and in many ways become brutalized from a lack of counteracting ideals.

A compulsory continuation school is therefore an absolute necessity of the age.  It is also urgently required from the military standpoint.  Such a school, to be fruitful in results, must endeavour, not only to prevent the scholar from forgetting what he once learnt, and to qualify him for a special branch of work, but, above all, to develop his patriotism and sense of citizenship.  To do this, it is necessary to explain to him the relation of the State to the individual, and to explain, by reference to our national history, how the individual can only prosper by devotion to the State.  The duties of the individual to the State should be placed in the foreground.  This instruction must be inspired by the spirit which animated Schleiermacher’s sermons in the blackest hour of Prussia, and culminated in the doctrine that all the value of the man lies in the strength and purity of his will, in his free devotion to the great whole; that property and life are only trusts, which must be employed for higher ideals; that the mind, which thinks only of itself, perishes in feeble susceptibility, but that true moral worth grows up only in the love for the fatherland and for the State, which is a haven for every faith, and a home of justice and honourable freedom of purpose.

Only if national education works in this sense will it train up men to fill our armies who have been adequately prepared for the school of arms, and bring with them the true soldierly spirit from which great deeds spring.  What can be effected by the spirit of a nation we have learnt from the history of the War of Liberation, that never-failing source of patriotic sentiment, which should form the backbone and centre of history-teaching in the national and the continuation schools.