His aversion for knowledge is strong and sincere. He has refused learning, and seems, even as a child, to have been “deviled for nothing.” Also, it is necessary for the dictatorship to keep the people as ignorant as it can; only while the people remain unsuspecting, unaware of the truths of the past and present, can the dictatorship unleash its lies.
“Faith is harder to shake than knowledge,” he continues. “Love succumbs less than respect to change, hate lasts longer than aversion, and the impetus toward the most powerful upheavals on this earth has rested at all times less in a scientific knowledge ruling the masses than in a fanaticism blessing them, and often in a hysteria that drove them forwards.”
This is the positive force that is to take the place of the 90 per cent of school material which Hitler brands as superfluous. “Faith” — in the Führer, and the truth about him concealed; “Love”—for the Führer, with respect conceded as unworthy; “Hate” — of enemies whom mere “aversion” could not destroy; and, above all, the hysteria which is checked by scientific knowledge, the “fanaticism blessing” the masses.
The positive force is summed up: “The whole end of education in a people’s State, and its crown, is found by burning into the heart and brain of the youth entrusted to it an instinctive and comprehended sense of race…. It is the duty of a national State to see to it that a history of the world is eventually written in which the question of race shall occupy a predominant position….* According to this plan, the curriculum must be built up with this point of view. According to this plan, education must so be arranged that the young person leaving school is not half pacifist, democrat or what have you, but a complete German…. Also, in this case (for girls), the greatest importance is to be given the development of the body, and only after that on the requirements of the mind, and finally of the soul. The aim of the education of women must be inflexibly that of the future mother.”
The Epilogue of Mein Kampf expresses in all clearness the whole purpose of education in Nazi Germany. “A state which, in the era of race-poisoning, devotes itself to the care of its best racial elements must one day become master of the world.”
That is the aim: to make the Nazis the rulers of the world. It is towards this that Hitler stares, that Germany is equipping itself; this is fixed before the eyes of the children,
DR. RUST AND OTHER EDUCATORS
After a year of preparation, transition and experiment in the schools, Hitler’s educational program was made effective on April 30, 1934, the day on which Dr. Bernhard Rust was appointed “Reich Minister of Science, Education, and Culture For the People ( Volksbildung ).” Dr. Rust, an unemployed teacher from Hanover, had belonged to the Nazi Party since 1922. In 1925, he was promoted to the post of Gauleiter of the Party for the district of Hanover and Brunswick. He held office as educator of the republican democratic youth of his home town until 1930. Indeed, it seemed not to be his political activities against the State, whose employee he was, that led to his dismissal, but rather his nervous disorder, which was causing violent attacks of complete insanity at increasingly short periods. Dr. Rust was forced to take longer and longer holidays at sanatoriums, and the State could not hold itself responsible for his ability as a teacher, even during the moments of comparative clarity in the Doctor’s mind.
Bernhard Rust had been decorated with the Iron Cross during the War, and had written about his experience in these terms to his son: “Received today under the thunder of guns the Iron Cross. Your hero father.”
It’s a good story: Rust rises in the Party, to which the ex-teacher seems highly learned, and lands his post right after the success of the grab for power. He moves up with increasing momentum. As early as February, 1933, he is Prussian Minister of Culture, and a year later he is promoted to Dictator of Education. He has held his office with the dilettante laxness characteristic of Nazi administration, and with the nervous unpredictable jitters that, four years before, had taken away his teacher’s job. Rust makes laws now, and repeals them when he has convinced himself of their total impracticability. He not only reduced the period of compulsory public school training from thirteen years to twelve; he went farther, and tried to cut the school week. It had always been customary in Germany to go to school six days out of the seven, with only Sunday as holiday. By an edict of June 7, 1934, Rust canceled Saturday, calling it the “Reich Youth Day.” On Saturdays there were to be no lessons; only “national festivals.”