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Underestimated effect of Gymnasium instruction. One seldom looks for the value of the Gymnasium in the things that are really learned there, never to be forgotten, but rather in those things that are taught but which the pupil assimilates only with reluctance, to shake off as soon as he can. As it is carried out everywhere, reading the Classics is an odious procedure (as every educated man will admit): for young people who are in no respect ready for it, by teachers who by their every word, and often by their appearance, throw a blight over a good author. But therein lies the value that is generally underestimated: that these teachers speak the abstract language of higher culture, ponderous and hard to understand though it is, but an elevated exercise 25 of the brain; that concepts, technical terms, methods, and allusions continually occur in their language which young people almost never hear in the conversations of their relatives or in the streets. If pupils only listen, their intellect will be automatically preformed to a scientific way of thinking. It is not possible to emerge from this training as a pure child of nature, fully untouched by abstraction.