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Class Divisions and School Curricula in a Small-Town Elementary School (1880s)

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Classes with him were often terribly boring, especially the four writing classes per week, which we spent writing down some lovely saying, probably a dozen times or more, according to old rules. “The first step is always the hardest”, “Self-indulgence makes you a beggar,” “You have to throw a sprat to catch a mackerel,” “Fresh fish are good fish,” “Hearing the sermon does not hold you up” – we wrote down proverbs of this sort, monotonously, for hours. If you felt like it, you went up to the teacher’s desk with a few completed pages, he cast a weary eye over them and then put some sort of mark in red ink at the bottom of the pages; sometimes it meant insufficient, sometimes satisfactory, but mostly good. The teacher did not care whether a pupil attended classes or not; he accepted both sorts of behavior with the same never-ending patience.



Source: August Winning, Frührot. Ein Buch von Heimat und Jugend [Early Dawn: A Book About Home and Youth]. Stuttgart-Berlin, 1924, pp. 22-23, 43-44, 60-61.

Original German text reprinted in Gerhard A. Ritter and Jürgen Kocka, eds., Deutsche Sozialgeschichte 1870-1914. Dokumente und Skizzen [German Social History 1870-1914. Documents and Sketches], 3rd ed. Munich: C.H. Beck, 1982, pp. 281-82.

Translation: Erwin Fink

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