Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER III GERMAN UNIVERSITIES HIGH-SCHOOLS OF KULTUR AND BRUTALITY THERE is no boast which falls more often from German lips than that they are the most educated people in the world. With justice they are proud of their school system and like to talk about it, but if mention is made of their twenty-two universities, the average German takes a deep breath before discussing the Hochschulen, in order to accord such a sacred subject the honour which is due to it. The author well remembers how his Nuremberg friends looked upon him with a special kind of awe after his appointment to a German university had been notified in the Press of the Fatherland. They seemed to look upon this as an honour second only to one which can fall to the lot of man ? the excepted dignity being, of course, the officer’s uniform. Bavaria, with a population not exceeding seven millions, supports three universities ? two with a Catholic and one (Erlangen) with a Protestant Faculty of Theology. In these three there are ? in times of peace ? about ten thousand students, while the remaining German States support universities containing roughly fifty thousand students. Without any fear of contradiction it may be said that Germany easily holds the record for turning out
university men. On the whole the various States spare no expense 1 whatever in making these institutions the finest in the world, with the result that in medicine, experimental science and so on, the institutes have become models for other countries. Failing the opportunity to become an officer, there is perhaps no more ardent desire in the heart of young Germany than to go to a university. There are many facilities to this end, for with care the student ? unless he is studying law or medicine ? can manage to squeeze through…