The Children's Village at Wegscheide

Abstract

For several years I had heard of the children's village at Wegscheide, near Frankfort on the Main, the .great outdoor school on a mountain top to which every Frankfort child, whether he comes from the aristocratic Gymnasium, the middle school, or the school for the common people, is taken for a month during his eighth school year. More than ten years ago the people of Frankfort decided that every child in their city should have at least one month of free, natural, wholesome life in the open; should share a common life of work and play with many comrades of his own age; should learn about birds and trees and flowers by searching for them in the woods and meadows, as well as by reading about them in books; and should have the joy of following a winding stream, building dams out of stones, and watching the sunset from a mountain top. From an abandoned training camp for soldiers on the top of a low mountain forty-five miles from Frankfort, they made a children's village, to which they have sent every summer since 1921 from five to seven thousand school children for a month of play and study in the great out-of-doors. I had heard that the pupils go there in regular classes with teachers whom they have known for many years, as is possible in Germany where school children usually have the same teacher in mathematics for at least three years, often for six, and where the same continuity of instructors is preserved in all the other important subjects. I knew that the children's village is not in any sense a summer camp or a vacation enterprise but that it takes the place of one month's regular schooling, the children being given three hours of definite instruction every day. For several years I had planned to visit this children's village, and in the summer of 1933 I was able to carry out my plan. I arrived at Wegscheide in the middle of the afternoon and strolled along the streets of the little village practically unnoticed. It was