The question of the technical phases of education is, with any nation, a vital one. Perhaps this is true of Germany as it is of no other European country.
on schools. Definition is made even more doubtful when we find that the limits of certain schools overlap. It may be said that students are regularly admitted from fourteen to sixteen years of age. Not infrequently however, boys and men of more mature years take advantage of the courses offered. Instruction is carried on during the week-day evenings from six to eight o'clock and on Sunday mornings.
Prussia leads the other states in the number and character of her supplementary schools, the system having its fullest expression in Berlin. The fact became early apparent that preparation, whatever line the boy was to follow, was necessary, and this thought is confirmed in the many skilled laborers in Germany to-day. In Prussia, as elsewhere, it was found that boys many times left the common school before they became proficient in any line of book work. The causes were various; poverty, indifference, sickness, overcrowding, poor enforcement of the compulsory attendance laws,--all these conspired to make sup
