Zazi Germany's Shocking Education System

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXXVII, Issue 23839, 14 December 1940, Page 1 (Supplement)

Zazi Germany's Shocking Education System

Dorians who wore to be a branch of the Greek people. They came as a ripple of Unit Aryan wave which was running west through Europe, and in the fertile Kurotas valley, where the reed-f'ringed river Hows south through the mountains to the treacherous Laeonian Gulf, they made their home. From here they extended their dominion over the great plain of .Messeuia, and drove back the Arcadians into their rugged glens. The long Dorian spear, the short bronze sword and the round .Dorian shield on the Spartans' arms were supreme in the l'eloponnese. And then a strange thing happened. Instead of mingling with the subject populations as did the other invading tribes, some obscure reason made this community decide to maintain its race and blood. That is the key to all tin" Spartan code. To survive in a hostile world every man of Sparta had to be a soldier. Hence the barrack ways of living. Hence eugenics and exaltation of healthy motherhood, without sentiment: and what the rest of Greece called morals, hence, too, a Gestapo armed with knives and authority to kill io terrify the serfs. Hence, chief of all, the famous educational system which neglected heart

and brain and built a youth of steelhard muscles, mad loyalty to a savage code, blind patriotism, obedience as blind, enduring of hardship, scornful ot luxury, Avarlike and ruthless. J be National Socialist Party of Germany was born in a hostile world. It made Germany the gangster of the nations. Jf Germany was to live, Germany must be strong, German youth warlike, German babies strong and plentiful. Hence—-and Spartan history repeated itself. .Spartan education came to lite again, more vast, more wicked. Its Iruit is already r'ipening. "The tact," said Goebbels, last November, "that our people is engaging with all its strength in this war is largely the result of the education we have carried out over years." The aims of the system are shocking. "The German young of the future," said Hitler, at Nuremberg, live years ago, "must he as hard as steel from tho factories of Krupp. The development of mental capacity is only of secondary importance." The henchmen faithfully echo. Goebbels once wrote a short story. One of the characters says: "We are not on earth tor the purpose of cramming our skulls with knowledge. Bring up tough guys, that is what the business of the high schools should be! The intellect is a danger to the shaping ot tho character." "Liberty is Dangerous" The last poisonous sentence is revealing. The last thing ■welcomed by authoritarians is free thought. Il leads to tree speech, and liberty is dangerous. I'o continue. Hear von Schirach, he of the wreath at Codreauu's re-burial: "Youth will respect only the tough. The tough teacher will know how to turn the classroom into a rousing experience. He who is not tough is hopeless. This splendid aim of producing "toughs" dominates everything, ft is a fact, which men of eminence in any branch of culture will verily, that from the once fruitful soil of Germany no scholarship has sprung for six or seven years. Consideration of the bestial outlook of the syllabus will suggest that nothing more will come until the Nazi curse is purged. Every thing is military. The chemistry books stink of poison gas. Simple sums have bombs instead of apples. History is a howling wilderness of lies. Even geography is haunted by Versailles, while the aim of every class is to make the child arrogantly hard, and

THE story of the great Nazi crime against the soul of man .has no blacker page than that vhich tells of the schools of Germany. There is a sense in which the raw brutality of the concentration camps is less revolting than the studied wickedness of the organised attack upon the mind of vouth which Goebbels calls National Socialist education. The horrible thing which is happening to-day to the boys and girls of Germany happened once before in history, and the ancient story is a comment on to-day. The reverse is also true, for fresh from the bulletins of the Ministry of Information, which marshal in cold quotation and brief comment the facts of the modern atrocity, the student of

ancient history realises with surprise that he has looked upon the story of Sparta with a callous interest which has forgotten what those Nazis ot old Greece destroyed both in themselves and in their neighbours. All the course of history might have been different had a population in southern Greece, 10.000 strong, known the quickening spirit which made Athens' glory, and had contributed to the story of their race something better than a grim legal code and a memory of militarism. "I have one great anxiety," wrote Hitler, and we trust that he now has more, "which causes me trouble. And that is the anxiety that it may not be possible to educate successors for the leadership and guidance of the National Socialist Party." That anxiety faced Sparta. The facts will bear a moment's scrutiny before we turn to Germany, for they are illuminating. In the dawn of history, down into the southern claw of Greece moved the

Fifteen Million Young Barbarians are Product of Organised HISTORY KNOWS NO BLACKER CRIME

By E. M. BLAIKLOCK

and training in the Hitler "Weltanschauung," the Nazi view, in other words, oi life, the world and history. "Mt'iii Kampf" is holy reading. There is "religious" instruction'on the .lines of Rosenberg. The lasting values of Christianity, of course, are all "the fruit of the German character." Indeed, as the Minister of Church Affairs avers, a "new authority on Christ has appeared in Adolf Hitler." The Christ of tlie Jews and gentle living, ranks with Marx and Uousseau in the "poison library," which provides the high school with the literature of dangerous thought. Acid the art of haranguing crowds, and the syllabus is complete. Much -more could he said. The Educational Section of the British Ministry of .Information issues weekly bulletins of six or seven pages, typed economically on both sides. We cannot dismiss the documented horrors as incredible. It is bald fact that we are facing in arms the embodiment oi all evil. Whatever the battle may cost, it is a matter for thankfulness that blind lust for dominion drove Hitler to decisive action in 19.59, and not ten years later. There is still hope for a beaten Germany. The Church is still alive, though i|i the Catacombs. There are men who remember freedom. There is youth not yet poisoned. The Nazi fetters are not yet locked. We remember Sparta again. Her I crime endured for centuries, and Athens, which gave us all the best of Greece, bled white in final conflict with her. What remains of Sparta? And what of this same Athens. Greek

servilely obedient, to fill liis heart with the primitive emotions of race hatred, tear and dog-like worship of his masters, his mind with catchwords designed to discourage the painful and dangerous effort of thought. Imagine three-year-olds turned from Miimpty Dumpty to nursery rhymes like this. What, puffs ami palters? What clicks and clatters? ] know what, oh, what fun, it's a lovely Tommy-gun. And so the pollution of infancy goes 011. The babies cut out swastikas and have picture lessons. "Here is Adolf Hitler and a boy." "Here is Adolf Hitler and an aeroplane." "Here is Adolf Hitler and bis friends. He is speaking." Next, bombs are drawn in chalk, or guns in crayon. "We don't believe in having them too civilised," said Goering, to Henderson, while demonstrating the toy bombers in his nursery. Anxiety About Leadership We quoted Hitler's anxiety about leadership. The special schools housed in old Bavarian castles are designed to meet this need. The Nazi theory is simple. To make leaders, you toughen the toughest tough. "You boys," said hey, at a function, "who have come Through the strictest selection, are perhaps not the best scholars, but undoubtedly tho toughest" (haertesten). The Prussian .Junkers, who passed with 1918, are to be replaced by more and better Nazi .Junkers, designed to lead the fifteen million barbarians, whom the system is already loosing 011 the world. Civilisation has known no such danger since theifanatic youth of Islam broke on the Pyrenees. And Saracens we re never mass-produced. Potential leaders are recruited from all classes. No chance is risked that the natural supply of desperados like Goering and Wessel will fail. Thirtytwo Adolf Hitler schools have already received tens of thousands of boys in yearly drafts, and the work of providing the next generation with Nazi bosses is well under "wa v.

Thi' hoys are selected at the age of twelve on racial, physical and party grounds. In their castle schools they are served by uniformed retainers. Kvery four pupils share a car. for with an ugly streak of weakness unknown in Sparta, the Nazis feel a need to buy loyalty hy an early taste of the private luxuries of the upper ten. There is little intellectual training in these schools for barbarians; There is much memorising of the Nazi creed,

mother of freedom? Hear Compton MacKenzie's answer. "What now remains of Sparta? A mound or two beside a squalid village on which the sublime mass of the Taygetus looks down. Yet less sublime is that mountain range than Athens' Acropolis whose diadem of marble was wrought by the hand of man. What now remains of Sparta? The brave story ot Thermopylae written by a Greek, whom Athens rewarded. Of Athens? Not a tithe, not a hundredth part indeed of what she gave

to humanity, but of tragedy, of comedy, of philosophy and architecture and political experiment, half the beauty and wisdom of the world." There might have been more had Sparta never existed. And Sparta iias come back, huge as the modern world. Victorious Sparta tore down the walls of Athens to the screaming of flutes. Victorious Germany would tear down more Mian walls of stone. The heritage of all time is bound with* Freedom's victory.