The Goslings: A Study of the American Schools

by Upton Sinclair

For the high school and college boys they have what they call the Reserve Officers’ Training Corps; wherever possible, they compel them to serve and where the people have prevented this, they lure the boys by uniforms and music and badges and banners and holidays in camp. They teach them to plunge bayonets into human bodies, and to snarl and howl like wild beasts while doing it. Says Mr. Ray McKaig, of Boise, Idaho:

In 1922 one very prominent club woman came home to find a group of children watching her fourteen-year-old boy bayoneting a dummy and screaming while so doing. To her horror she found that he was learning this at high school. She learned that the commandant, a West Point officer, was deliberately instilling arrogance into the boys. Oftentimes the boys, in squads led by a corporal and fully armed, would walk down the sidewalk brushing others in the gutter. A large public funeral was held of one of the leading Boise citizens, and the high school boys were having a military drill. With insolence characteristic of militarism “made in Germany” these young future soldiers were ordered to break through the funeral procession, instead of waiting quietly until it had passed by.

One of the lads who was being taught militarism in Camp Kearney, California, turned traitor and delivered to me the typewritten memorandum of a lecture on “Military Psychology,” delivered July 26, 1920, by Robert J. Halpin, Lt. Colonel of Infantry. It consists of approximately fifteen hundred words of blood-thirsty raving; I cannot spare space for it all, but I quote one paragraph from the beginning and one from the end, and assure you that the rest is all the same:

This is a period of a truce. The Great Wars of the world have not been fought. . . .

Gentlemen: There will be wars until the end of time. Everlasting peace is for the grave—not for life. The wish for everlasting peace is born of fear and ignorance. It is a sure sign of weakness and a declining civilization.

This is an old, old story—the training of little children to the murdering of their fellowmen and calling it glory. In the old days this was Kultur, and we went to war to put a stop to it, but apparently have not done so. The capitalists who now rule Germany are being robbed by the capitalists of France; and they are preparing the school children of Germany for the next war, in which they will gain a chance to rob the capitalists of France. In a “German History for Schools,” which is used in all the schools of present-day Germany, it is stated that French airplanes bombarded German railways before the declaration of war; this in spite of the fact that the German ambassador at Paris asserted the falsity of the charge.

This is wicked of the Germans, and ought to be stopped at once. The French are getting ready to stop it; the capitalists of France, who are robbing the capitalists of Germany, are training the children of France for the next war, by teaching them from text-books equally full of lies. There is a history of the great war, in use throughout the schools and written by a school director; “For Our France” is the title, and in it the Germans are described as “a host of savages, whose profession is war, and who go about to despoil, to devastate, and to terrorize.” Under the heading of “Entertainment” there is a series of questions adapted to children, dealing with the savageness of the Teutons. There is also a reader for primary and secondary schools, full of terrible stories of murder and rape; also a volume entitled “Les Lectures des Petits,” that is, readings for young children, full of such stories. In Belgium there is an “Atlas Manual of Geography,” intended for use in high schools, published four years after the end of the war, describing the Germans as “brigands, thieves and assassins”; they are not to be received into the League of Nations, but must be kept under surveillance, like the Negroes and the Malay races—even these have hearts but the Germans have none.

Strange as it may seem to you, they are teaching such stuff, not merely to the children of Belgium and France, but to the children of America who study French! For example, a standard text-book, Chardenal’s “Complete French Course,” New and Revised Edition, 1920, is full of the basest French chauvinism: Germany was the sole author of the war; the real hero of the world, and of France, is always the warrior; the sacred places of France are the victorious battle-fields, and the scenes of peace conferences such as Versailles. The date of the signing of this most infamous of all the world’s peace treaties has a mystic significance, because it was four hundred years previously, on that same day, June 28, 1519, that Charles V was elected Emperor!

There are some really sane men writing on the subject of war and peace in France at the present time; but never would it do for American school children to read anything by Anatole France or Romain Rolland! Any more than it would do for them to read the writings of American humanitarians, such as Jane Addams or David Starr Jordan. Says Dr. Jordan, concerning our school text-books:

They have glorified deeds of blood and celebrated most persistently the heroes of the battle-field. The heroes of peace barely appear on their pages, and they fail to recognize that the actual heroisms which have brightened the records of war like flashes of lightning in a thunderstorm are not products of war. They represent the divine in man revealed in desperate conditions, in wallowing in physical and moral mud, midst the barbaric loneliness of war.