Germany and the Next War

by Friedrich von Bernhardi

Religious instruction proper ought to begin in the middle standard. Up to that point the teacher should be content, from the religious standpoint, to work on the child's imagination and feelings with the simplest ideas of the Deity, but in other respects to endeavour to awaken and encourage the intellectual life, and make it able to grasp loftier conceptions. The national school stands in total contradiction to this intellectual development. This is in conformity to regulations, for the same children who read the Bible independently are only to be led to "an approximate comprehension of those phenomena which are daily around them." In the course of eight years they learn a smattering of reading, writing, and ciphering.[A] It is significant of the knowledge of our national history which the school imparts that out of sixty-three recruits of one company to whom the question was put who Bismarck was, not a single one could answer. That the scholars acquire even a general idea of their duties to the country and the State is quite out of the question. It is impossible to rouse the affection and fancy of the children by instruction in history, because the two sexes are taught in common. One thing appeals to the heart of boys, another to those of girls; and, although I consider it important that patriotic feelings should be inculcated among girls, since as mothers they will transmit them to the family, still the girls must be influenced in a different way from the boys. When the instruction is common to both, the treatment of the subject by the teacher remains neutral and colourless. It is quite incomprehensible how such great results are expected in the religious field when so little has been achieved in every other field.

This pedantic school has wandered far indeed from the ideal that Frederick the Great set up. He declared that the duty of the State was "to educate the young generation to independent thinking and self-devoted love of country."

[Footnote A: Recently a boy was discharged from a well-known national school as an exceptionally good scholar, and was sent as well qualified to the office of a Head Forester. He showed that he could not copy correctly, to say nothing of writing by himself.]

Our national school of to-day needs, then, searching and thorough reform if it is to be a preparatory school, not only for military education, but for life generally. It sends children out into the world with undeveloped reasoning faculties, and equipped with the barest elements of knowledge, and thus makes them not only void of self-reliance, but easy victims of all the corrupting influences of social life. As a matter of fact, the mind and reasoning faculties of the national schoolboy are developed for the first time by his course of instruction as a recruit.

It is obviously not my business to indicate the paths to such a reform. I will only suggest the points which seem to me the most important from the standpoint of a citizen and a soldier.

First and foremost, the instruction must be more individual. The number of teachers, accordingly, must be increased, and that of scholars diminished. It is worth while considering in this connection the feasibility of beginning school instruction at the age of eight years. Then all teaching must be directed, more than at present, to the object of developing the children's minds, and formal religious instruction should only begin in due harmony with intellectual progress. Finally, the Realien, especially the history of our own country, should claim more attention, and patriotic feelings should be encouraged in every way; while in religious instruction the moral influence of religion should be more prominent than the formal contents. The training of the national school teacher must be placed on a new basis. At present it absolutely corresponds to the one-sided and limited standpoint of the school itself, and does not enable the teachers to develop the minds and feelings of their pupils. It must be reckoned a distinct disadvantage for the upgrowing generation that all instruction ends at the age of fourteen, so that, precisely at the period of development in which the reasoning powers are forming, the children are thrown back on themselves and on any chance influences. In the interval between school life and military service the young people not only forget all that they learnt, perhaps with aptitude, in the national school, but they unthinkingly adopt distorted views of life, and in many ways become brutalized from a lack of counteracting ideals.

A compulsory continuation school is therefore an absolute necessity of the age. It is also urgently required from the military standpoint. Such a school, to be fruitful in results, must endeavour, not only to prevent the scholar from forgetting what he once learnt, and to qualify him for a special branch of work, but, above all, to develop his patriotism and sense of citizenship. To do this, it is necessary to explain to him the relation of the State to the individual, and to explain, by reference to our national history, how the individual can only prosper by devotion to the State. The duties of the individual to the State should be placed in the foreground. This instruction must be inspired by the spirit which animated Schleiermacher's sermons in the blackest hour of Prussia, and culminated in the doctrine that all the value of the man lies in the strength and purity of his will, in his free devotion to the great whole; that property and life are only trusts, which must be employed for higher ideals; that the mind, which thinks only of itself, perishes in feeble susceptibility, but that true moral worth grows up only in the love for the fatherland and for the State, which is a haven for every faith, and a home of justice and honourable freedom of purpose.

Only if national education works in this sense will it train up men to fill our armies who have been adequately prepared for the school of arms, and bring with them the true soldierly spirit from which great deeds spring. What can be effected by the spirit of a nation we have learnt from the history of the War of Liberation, that never-failing source of patriotic sentiment, which should form the backbone and centre of history-teaching in the national and the continuation schools.

We can study it also by an example from most recent history, in the Russo-Japanese War. "The education of the whole Japanese people, beginning at home and continued at school, was based on a patriotic and warlike spirit. That education, combined with the rapidly acquired successes in culture and warfare, aroused in the Japanese a marvellous confidence in their own strength. They served with pride in the ranks of the army, and dreamed of heroic deeds…. All the thoughts of the nation were turned towards the coming struggle, while in the course of several years they had spent their last farthing in the creation of a powerful army and a strong fleet."[B] This was the spirit that led the Japanese to victory. "The day when the young Japanese enlisted was observed as a festival in his family."[B]

In Russia, on the contrary, the idea was preached and disseminated that "Patriotism was an obsolete notion," "war was a crime and an anachronism," that "warlike deeds deserved no notice, the army was the greatest bar to progress, and military service a dishonourable trade."[B] Thus the Russian army marched to battle without any enthusiasm, or even any comprehension of the momentous importance of the great racial war, "not of free will, but from necessity." Already eaten up by the spirit of revolution and unpatriotic selfishness, without energy or initiative, a mechanical tool in the hand of uninspired leaders, it tamely let itself be beaten by a weaker opponent.