There’s something sinful about an evening in a pub. Half by half are emptied, talked about stupidly and the hard-earned money is slipped to the dashing waitresses as if there was no tomorrow. Apparently a teacher in 1852 disliked this so much that he made a lesson out of it: How many guilders could (a fictional) Klaus save in the next ten years, he would drink his beers at home from now on and no longer in the pub, wherever he always orders five instead of three – including leap years?
This is task number 984 of a calculus with the auspicious title “1000 and a few hundred calculation tasks for the pupils of the 1st and 2nd grades in German schools”. But the content is anything but magical. The arithmetic problem follows the arithmetic problem when printed closely. There are exactly 1000 on just 46 pages, for “adding”, “subtracting”, “multiplying” and “dividing”. One looks in vain for sketches or pictures in the 19th century Lambacher Schweitzer – as in most school books from the time of the Bavarian Kingdom.
This was marked by stubborn memorization of catechisms and military discipline. Who made heaven and earth? What are the names of the genera of the second order? And how do you translate “Everything with God” in French? “It was about quantity,” says Werner Wiater. The school teacher and former Vice President of the University of Augsburg is the founder of the International Society for Historical and Systematic Research on Textbooks and Educational Media. So he is familiar with the printed works that the children of the kingdom received from the state in the hope of turning them into godly, patriotic and capable Bavarians.
In the spring the classrooms were empty and the children were in the fields
The fact that you can go back in time without having to laboriously rummage through an archive is not least thanks to Wiier’s alma mater. Because at the Augsburg University Library employees have set out to digitize part of the 15,000 old school books from the inventory. The university hired an external service provider for this purpose. Perseverance is required from its employees: for months, they use a mobile scanner to record page by page of the fragile primers, sheets and calculation tables. In doing so, they have to proceed cautiously, not only to digitally record the certificates from another school world, but also not to destroy them in their analogue form.
It would be a shame too. After all, you can immerse yourself with them in a time when the timetable essentially consisted of religion, reading, writing, arithmetic. In the spring the classrooms became emptier because the children were needed in the fields and the teacher kept rushing to church to ring the bells and play the organ. Schools officially became a state affair at the beginning of the 19th century. The school inspectorate initially remained with the local clergy.
The influence was correspondingly great. “Far from heaven – where the angels are – God loves to look at every child”, the second grade reader begins with such piousness. The catechisms of the Church, the divine truth, recorded on paper in lively old German script, took up a large part of the lesson. Where are heaven and earth from? Is there more than one god? And where does it come from that we humans are naturally inclined to evil? If the answer wasn’t prompt, the rod was often used.
One subject: the arts of defense of the homeland
Anyone who hoped for a little creative change in art class would have been disappointed: Where comics are designed today and Dürer’s paintings are transferred with the box system, our great-grandparents had to draw dull lines and triangles. There were also clear structures in language teaching. If you open the “Conversation” from 1901, you are not immersed in a colorful world of speech bubbles and a talking parrot named Arthur. No, the book is a sporty ride through useful translations. From “God bless you!” (“Que Dieu te bénisse! “) to number 642,” This is very important “(“Voila qui est d’une grande importance”). It is not known whether the senior daughter Hildegard Wiedenmann, who was immortalized on the last page, actually held out to the end.
But it is, as elementary school students have already been instructed in the noble arts of defense of the fatherland. “A piebald horse – a blantes rifle – a wooden sword – what more do you need?” Rattled the sabers in a reading book for second graders. The state set the tone, set itself apart, prepared the atmosphere that later culminated in the First World War. “It was no different abroad,” says Wiater.
There was only limited room for humor, and if at all it shimmered through subtly. This is also the case in the epochal math work from 1852. As grande finale follows the “tasks for special reflection”, with question number 1000 a “task for very special reflection” on nine lines. We are looking for a word consisting of four letters, which results in the sum 34 if you enter their position in the alphabet for the letters. Unfortunately, nowhere is it written about which teacher promoted his pupils with so much fervor. Neither does the solution to the riddle.