What Did You Learn at School Today?
From Facing History and Ourselves:
Holocaust and Human Behavior, Chapter 3
The war did not alter every part of German life. The nation’s schools changed very little, if at all. Albert Einstein, a student in Germany before the war, claimed that his teachers were more interested in producing “mental machines” than in educating human beings. The experiences of Albert Speer, who later became a high-ranking Nazi official, suggest that the leaders of the republic held similar views.
Speer recalled that “In spite of the Revolution, which had brought us the Weimar Republic, it was still impressed upon us that the distribution of power in society and the traditional authorities were part of the God-given order of things. We remained largely untouched by the currents stirring everywhere in the early twenties. In school, there would be no criticism of courses or subject matter, let alone the ruling powers of the state… It never occurred to us to doubt the order of things." 1 A German named Klaus, who was a little younger than Speer, had a similar experience:
We were taught history as a series of facts. We had to learn dates, names, places of battles. Periods during which Germany won wars were emphasized. Periods during which Germany lost wars were sloughed over. We heard very little about World War I, except that the Versailles peace treaty was a disgrace, which someday, in some vague way, would be rectified....If we tried to relate ideas we got from literature or history to current events, our teachers changed the subject.
I really don’t believe that anyone was deliberately trying to evade politics. Those teachers really seemed to think that what went on in the Greek and Roman Empire was more important than what was happening on the streets of Berlin and Munich. They considered any attempt to bring up current political questions a distraction…because we hadn’t done our homework.
And there was always a great deal of homework in a school like mine, which prepared students for the university. At the end of our senior year, we were expected to take a detailed and exceedingly tough exam called the Abitur. How we did on the exam could determine our whole future. Again, the Abitur concentrated on our knowledge of facts, not on interpretation or on the expression of personal ideas. Looking back on it now, it also didn’t seem to measure our ability to reason clearly...to draw conclusions, to interpret ideas.2
As Klaus reflected on his adolescence, he noted the emphasis on group activities rather than individual action.
I liked to wander in the woods around Berlin. So my mother enrolled me in a hiking club. I pointed out tactfully that this was not what I had in mind. Marching around the countryside, singing sentimental German folk songs with twenty other boys, was not my idea of fun. I liked to stroll around by myself… enjoying the quiet and the scenery. My mother somehow gave me to understand that this was unmasculine… and what’s more, un-German.
There was a great deal of control over my life and that of my friends….We lived for the future. We had to think very little, take almost no initiative, our days were charted out for us. It seems strange that with bloody street fights almost every weekend, groups of brown-shirted men singing aggressive songs on Saturday mornings as they marched to their training grounds, political assassinations on the front pages of the papers regularly, we never felt threatened, never afraid of anything but failure in school.3
Even when the “currents stirring everywhere” could not be ignored, teachers tried to do so. For example, in 1923, France occupied the Rhineland to force Germany to make reparations payments. Among the soldiers sent to enforce the Treaty of Versailles were men from French colonies in Africa. A teacher said of them:
Day after day I had to suffer the sight of French black troops marching from the one-time garrison city of Diez to their training place at Altendiez… I taught the children under my care never so much as to look at these black fighters. If, by chance, they happened to pass by the school during recess, teachers and pupil would turn their backs and remain standing like pillars of salt. The German-speaking [French] officers and non-coms well understood this mute protest of German youth and its teachers, and not infrequently gave vent to their anger in the foulest language.4
- Speer speaks of learning the “God-given order of things.” What does the phrase mean? How important is it to learn? Have you learned it?
- The emphasis in German education was on the wars that Germany won rather than on the ones it lost. The failure to discuss World War I was an important omission. What schools choose not to teach is often as important as what they do teach. How did the failure to teach World War I distort German history? Betray German students?
- Every school teaches attitudes and values as well as facts and skills. What attitudes and values were Klaus’s teachers conveying when they tried to control what students learned? When they refused to discuss current events? What values are reflected in the emphasis on the Abitur, the exam that controlled so much of Klaus’s life? What values did the children learn the day they were instructed to turn their backs on African soldiers?
- Compare education in the United States today with education in the Weimar Republic. What values did German children learn in the 1920s? How well did their schools prepare them for life in a democracy? What values are stressed in American schools, including your own? How well prepared are you and your classmates for life in a democracy? (To find out more about education in your community, interview your parents, teachers, and principal. You may also wish to review the goals and objectives for the various courses that make up the curriculum at your school.) As an alternative project, review social studies textbooks used in American schools in the 1920s. What were American students learning? Compare their education to that of German students.
- When Albert Einstein became a teacher, he encouraged his students to reflect, ask questions, and criticize ideas. Why is thinking essential to a scientist? How important is it to a citizen? For what reasons? Record your ideas so that you can refer to them later.
1 Albert Speer, Spandau (Macmillan, 1976).
2 Ellen Switzer, How Democracy Failed, (New York: Atheneum, 1977), 62-63.
4 Theodore Abel, Why Hitler Came into Power, (Prentice-Hall, 1938), 47-48.
Switzer excerpts: Copyright © 1975 by Ellen Switzer. First appeared in How Democracy Failed, published by Atheneum. Reprinted with permission of Curtis Brown Ltd. All rights reserved.
