German Universities; A Narrative of Personal Experience, Together with Recent Statistical Information, Practical Suggestions, and a Comparison of the German, English and American Systems of Higher Education (Paperback)

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. Matriculation and Lectures. Deeming it advisable to preserve a certain unity of subject, I have thrown all remarks upon the study of German grammar into the preceding chapter, in order to dispose of them, although thereby making that chapter overlap the present by several months. I was not through with my grammar-travail until early spring, but I was matriculated in October. A German university is the one institution in the world that has for its motto: Time is Not money. The university is a law unto itself, each professor is a law unto himself, each student revolves on his own axis and at his own rate of speed. English and Americans have formed not a few queer notions of university life in Germany. They picture to themselves a town like Gottingen, for instance, as a place where everybody is running a break-neck race for scholarly fame, where days are months and hours days, where minutes are emphatically the gold-dust of time. The truth is that no one hurries or gets into a feaze over any thing, the university itself setting a good example. The academic year is divided into two terms, called the winter and the summer semesters. The winter semester covers nominally five months, from October15th to March 15th. In reality, both beginning and end are whittled off, so to speak, and there is a pause of two weeks at Christmas, so that the actual working time is little over four months. From March I5th to April 15th is the spring vacation. The summer semester then runs to August 1Sth, but practically the work is over by the first of that month. Supposing yourself to be a tyro in such matters, and the 15th of October to be drawing near, you are naturally impatient to be matriculated and at work. But you will discover that the older students are not yet back, and, on ...