SYSTEMS INSTITUTIONS AND STATISTICS OF PUBLIC INSTRUCTION IN DIFFERENT COUNTRIES. BY HENRY BARNARD, LL. D., LATE UNITED STATES COMMISSIONER OF EDUCATION. Part 1-EUROPE-German States. NEW YORK: PUBLISHED BY E. STEIGER, 22 AND 24 FRANKFORT STREET. PREFACE. In 1839 the author of this volume appended to his Annual Report, as Secretary of the Board of Commissioners of Common Schools for Connecticut, an account of public instruction in the principal states of Europe the results in part of his personal observation in those countries in 1835 and 1836, together with the results of the observations of eminent educators in the same field. In 1854 this account was expanded into a volume, and published as one of a series of educational documents authorized by the legislature of the state, to diffuse information respecting the organization, administration, and instruction of public schools in other countries. At the Educational Exhibition held in London in 1854, arrangements were made with the principal delegates, who were school officers and teachers, to secure a reliable account of the system of national education in their several states, by men familiar with the details of administration and instruction, for publication in the American Journal of Education, which it was then announced would be issued in 1855-6. Written communications, together with official documents, were received in accordance with this arrangement, which, in connection with elaborate papers published by Dr. Schmidt, in the Pädagogichie Encyclopädie, formed the basis of successive chapters in the American Journal, down to 1867. When the undersigned became Commissioner of Education, vigorous efforts were made to complete his plan, with a view of embodying the whole in a series of reports to Congress. So far as the work was completed in the Office of Education, it was communicated to Congress in a Special Report in 1869, which he has since issued as volume XX. of the Journal. This volume comprises all that he has published, in pursuance of the plan announced in 1854, together with recent educational statistics which belong to the different states of Germany, as constituted in 1866. HARTFORD, CONN., August, 1871. HENRY BARNARD. |