Youth

Abstract

The question of our further education was painstakingly considered by my father. From the time of Tsar Alexander 1st, who had set out with such zeal and success to improve the cultural development of his empire’s Baltic provinces, there existed in Riga a Latin school administered from the government in St. Petersburg. This secondary school laid emphasis on Greek and Latin and was organised along the lines of the schools which had been established in Germany since the start of the nineteenth century under the pernicious influence of Wilhelm von Humboldt . It was the “obvious” preparation for an academic career and, except for a short period in the eighteen seventies, the University in Dorpat, just like the universities in Germany, only accepted as students those who had passed the school leaving certificate exams of a secondary school specialising in the classics. As everybody knows there exists to this day in Germany the absurd situation that a university does not have the right to decide who may enter it, but must leave this central decision in the hands of the school examination committees.