School for Barbarians

by Mann Erika

Who has glanced into the hearts of this youth, whose ideas might have such power? Who knows if this emptiness, hardness, monotony, militarism — everything that starves and overstrains and kills personality— this drill for war — who knows if this is not reaching the point when it becomes untenable, when those secret hopes, worked for so long, will burst into the outer world and end the fury?

THE SCHOOL

U NTIL RECENTLY, GERMAN schools had the world’s respect: the relationship between teachers and pupils, especially just after the War, was human and dignified, and the teachers themselves were distinguished for thoroughness, discipline, and scientific exactness. The grammar schools and Gymnasien (high schools), colleges and universities, were open to all, and their moderate tuition fees were canceled for talented students of limited means. There were some, like the best American boarding schools, in beautiful, healthful places, whose modern methods allowed teacher and pupils to sit in the garden and have lessons that were remembered as stimulating conversation, or to make excursions over the hills and fields. There were performances in the school theaters, and films shown to supplement courses in natural science, history, and geography.

One subject, political propaganda, was missing from the curriculum. The German Republic refused to influence its citizens one way or the other, or to convince them of the advantages of democracy; it did not carry on any propaganda in its own favor. This proves to have been an error; and its atonement has been a terrible one. Whatever its cause, modesty or the waverings of a young and unconfident Republic, the error stands. What the Republic did toward education was done as a matter of course. Civic buildings, for peacetime use, were put up, and of these many were schools — airy, spacious, and happily adequate. They were set into service without propaganda or hullabaloo. The State was the people’s servant; it served in quiet, believing that its master, the people, would be thankful. But the State was wrong.

Unused to self-rule, the German people submitted to a new State which made itself the master, and forced the people to be its servants. The State and its Führer entered their power in a frenzy of display. The Fiihrer and his followers, shouting and raving, were the opposites of the old, submissive, quiet State. They praised their ideas as the only road to salvation; they commanded; they dictated.

What had been the field of politicians before, and known as “politics,” was now a Weltanschauung (philosophy of life), no less, and there was no other than the National Socialist Weltanschauung. It soon forced itself into the schools, changing them, making rules, interdicting, innovating, and completely changing their character within a few months.

Had the “old-fashioned” educators tried to make civilized human beings of the children in their care? Had they encouraged them in their search for truth? Left youth as much personal freedom as they thought compatible with discipline? Taken them to theaters and movies to serve educational purposes? Had they done all of this? It must all go, according to the Nazis, immediately and radically. Morals, truth, freedom, humanitarianism, peace, education — they were errors that corrupted the young, stupidities with no value to the Führer. “The purpose of our education,” he was crying, “is to create the political soldier. The only difference between him and the active soldier is that he is less specially trained.”

The changes were extensive and thorough. Where good educational methods remained, they were not new ones, but those taken over from the Republican German Youth Movement, from the progressive schools, or from Russian or American experiments. The new methods were recognizable by their violence and brutality. There was only one entirely new and entirely different idea: the purpose to which the new education was dedicated. And that purpose was the aims and plans of the Führer.

In Mein Kampf there is a short chapter devoted to the problem of the education of children, (Translator’s note: This chapter does not exist in the authorized American edition. There is a condensed version of the passages quoted here, in the chapter “The State,” pp. 167-175, from which the passages marked with asterisks are taken.) It contains the proposals of the Führer in this field, and all German children grow up today in the materialism expressed in these twenty-five pages.

“Principles for scientific schools…. In the first place, the youthful brain must not be burdened with subjects, 90 per cent of which it does not need and therefore forgets again.”* And “… it is incomprehensible why, in the course of years, millions of men must learn two or three foreign languages which they can use for only a fraction of that time, and so, also in the majority, forget them completely; for of 100,000 pupils who learn French, for example, scarcely 2,000 will have a serious use for this knowledge later, while 98,000 in the whole course of their lives will not be in a position to use practically what they have learned…. So, for the sake of the 2,000 people to whom the knowledge of these languages is of use, 98,000 are deviled for nothing, and waste precious time….”