The Proper Educational System for the Racial State

The general rule is that a strong and healthy mind is found only in a strong and healthy body.

There are exceptions when men of genius are found not to have robust health and stature, or are even of a sickly constitution.

When the bulk of a nation is composed of physical degenerates, it is rare for a great spirit to arise from such a miserable motley.

• In any case, his activities would never meet with great success.

A degenerate mob will either:

• be incapable of understanding him at all, or
• have so feeble a willpower that they cannot follow him soaring

The State that is grounded on the racial principle will first of all have to base its educational system not on the mere imparting of knowledge but rather on physical training and development of healthy bodies.

The cultivation of the intellectual facilities comes only in the second place.

• It is character which has to be developed first of all, strength of will and decision.

The educational system should foster the spirit of readiness to accept responsibilities gladly.

Formal instruction in the sciences must be considered last in importance.

The racial State must start with the principle that, compared to a scholarly and refined weakling, a person with less formal education in the sciences is more useful to society if the latter is:

• physically sound and robust
• of a steadfast and honest character
• ready and able to make decisions
• endowed with strength of will

A nation is not capable of assuring even its own existence if it is composed of:

• learned physical weaklings hesitant about decisions of the will
• timid pacifists

In the bitter struggles which decide the destiny of man, it is very rare that an individual loses because he lacked learning.

The losers are those who ignore these consequences and are too faint-hearted about putting them into effect.

There must be a certain balance between mind and body.

An ill-kept body is not made a more beautiful sight by the indwelling of a radiant spirit.

We should not be acting justly if we were to bestow the highest intellectual training on those who are physically deformed and crippled, who lack decision and are weak-willed and cowardly.

What has made the Greek ideal of beauty immortal is the wonderful union of a splendid physical beauty with nobility of mind and spirit.

Moltke’s saying, that in the long run fortune favours only the efficient, is certainly valid for the relationship between body and spirit. A mind which is sound will generally maintain its dwelling in a body that is sound.

Accordingly, in the People’s State physical training is not a matter for the individual alone. Nor is it a duty which first devolves on the parents and only secondly or thirdly a public interest; but it is necessary for the preservation of the people, who are represented and protected by the State.

As regards purely formal education the State even now interferes with the individual’s right of self-determination and insists upon the right of the community by submitting the child to an obligatory system of training, without paying attention to the approval or disapproval of the parents.

In a similar way and to a higher degree the new People’s State will one day make its authority prevail over the ignorance and incomprehension of individuals in problems appertaining to the safety of the nation.

It must organize its educational work in such a way that the bodies of the young will be systematically trained from infancy onwards, so as to be tempered and hardened for the demands to be made on them in later years. Above all, the State must see to it that a generation of stay-at-homes is not developed.

The work of education and hygiene has to begin with the young mother. The painstaking efforts carried on for several decades have succeeded in abolishing septic infection at childbirth and reducing puerperal fever to a relatively small number of cases.

And so it ought to be possible by means of instructing sisters and mothers in an opportune way, to institute a system of training the child from early infancy onwards so that this may serve as an excellent basis for future development.

The People’s State should allow much more time for physical training in the school. It is nonsense to burden young brains with a load of material of which, as experience shows, they retain only a small part, and mostly not the essentials, but only the secondary and useless portion; because the young mind is incapable of sifting the right kind of learning out of all the stuff that is pumped into it.

Today, even in the curriculum of the high schools, only two short hours in the week are reserved for gymnastics; and worse still, it is left to the pupils to decide whether or not they want to take part.

This shows a grave disproportion between this branch of education and purely intellectual instruction. Not a single day should be allowed to pass in which the young pupil does not have one hour of physical training in the morning and one in the evening; and every kind of sport and gymnastics should be included.

There is one kind of sport which should be specially encouraged, although many people who call themselves VÖLKISCH consider it brutal and vulgar, and that is boxing.

It is incredible how many false notions prevail among the ‘cultivated’ classes. The fact that the young man learns how to fence and then spends his time in duels is considered quite natural and respectable. But boxing–that is brutal. Why? There is no other sport which equals this in developing the militant spirit, none that demands such a power of rapid decision or which gives the body the flexibility of good steel.

It is no more vulgar when two young people settle their differences with their fists than with sharp-pointed pieces of steel. One who is attacked and defends himself with his fists surely does not act less manly than one who runs off and yells for the assistance of a policeman.

But, above all, a healthy youth has to learn to endure hard knocks. This principle may appear savage to our contemporary champions who fight only with the weapons of the intellect. But it is not the purpose of the People’s State to educate a colony of aesthetic pacifists and physical degenerates. This State does not consider that the human ideal is to be found in the honourable philistine or the maidenly spinster, but in a dareful personification of manly force and in women capable of bringing men into the world.

Generally speaking, the function of sport is not only to make the individual strong, alert and daring, but also to harden the body and train it to endure an adverse environment.

If our superior class had not received such a distinguished education, and if, on the contrary, they had learned boxing, it would never have been possible for bullies and deserters and other such CANAILLE to carry through a German revolution. For the success of this revolution was not due to the courageous, energetic and audacious activities of its authors but to the lamentable cowardice and irresolution of those who ruled the German State at that time and were responsible for it. But our educated leaders had received only an ‘intellectual’ training and thus found themselves defenceless when their adversaries used iron bars instead of intellectual weapons.

All this could happen only because our superior scholastic system did not train men to be real men but merely to be civil servants, engineers, technicians, chemists, litterateurs, jurists and, finally, professors; so that intellectualism should not die out. Our leadership in the purely intellectual sphere has always been brilliant, but as regards will-power in practical affairs our leadership has been beneath criticism.

Of course education cannot make a courageous man out of one who is temperamentally a coward. But a man who naturally possesses a certain degree of courage will not be able to develop that quality if his defective education has made him inferior to others from the very start as regards physical strength and prowess. The army offers the best example of the fact that the knowledge of one’s physical ability develops a man’s courage and militant spirit. Outstanding heroes are not the rule in the army, but the average represents men of high courage.

The excellent schooling which the German soldiers received before the War imbued the members of the whole gigantic organism with a degree of confidence in their own superiority such as even our opponents never thought possible.

All the immortal examples of dauntless courage and daring which the German armies gave during the late summer and autumn of 1914, as they advanced from triumph to triumph, were the result of that education which had been pursued systematically. During those long years of peace before the last War men who were almost physical weaklings were made capable of incredible deeds, and thus a selfconfidence was developed which did not fail even in the most terrible battles.

It is our German people, which broke down and were delivered over to be kicked by the rest of the world, that had need of the power that comes by suggestion from selfconfidence. But this confidence in one’s self must be instilled into our children from their very early years.

The whole system of education and training must be directed towards fostering in the child the conviction that he is unquestionably a match for anyand everybody. The individual has to regain his own physical strength and prowess in order to believe in the invincibility of the nation to which he belongs.

What has formerly led the German armies to victory was the sum total of the confidence which each individual had in himself, and which all of them had in those who held the positions of command. What will restore the national strength of the German people is the conviction that they will be able to reconquer their liberty. But this conviction can only be the final product of an equal feeling in the millions of individuals. And here again we must have no illusions.

The collapse of our people was overwhelming, and the efforts to put an end to so much misery must also be overwhelming. It would be a bitter and grave error to believe that our people could be made strong again simply by means of our present bourgeois training in good order and obedience.

That will not suffice if we are to break up the present order of things, which now sanctions the acknowledgment of our defeat and cast the broken chains of our slavery in the face of our opponents. Only by a superabundance of national energy and a passionate thirst for liberty can we recover what has been lost.

Also the manner of clothing the young should be such as harmonizes with this purpose.

Our young people have fallen victims to a fashion mania which perverts the meaning of the old adage that clothes make the man. Especially in regard to young people clothes should take their place in the service of education.

The boy who walks about in summer-time wearing long baggy trousers and clad up to the neck is hampered even by his clothes in feeling any inclination towards strenuous physical exercise. Ambition and, to speak quite frankly, even vanity must be appealed to.

I do not mean such vanity as leads people to want to wear fine clothes, which not everybody can afford, but rather the vanity which inclines a person towards developing a fine bodily physique. And this is something which everybody can help to do.

This will come in useful also for later years. The young girl must become acquainted with her sweetheart. If the beauty of the body were not completely forced into the background to-day through our stupid manner of dressing, it would not be possible for thousands of our girls to be led astray by Jewish mongrels, with their repulsive crooked waddle.

It is also in the interests of the nation that those who have a beautiful physique should be brought into the foreground, so that they might encourage the development of a beautiful bodily form among the people in general.

Military training is excluded among us to-day, and therewith the only institution which in peace-times at least partly made up for the lack of physical training in our education.

Therefore what I have suggested is all the more necessary in our time. The success of our old military training not only showed itself in the education of the individual but also in the influence which it exercised over the mutual relationship between the sexes.

The young girl preferred the soldier to one who was not a soldier. The People’s State must not confine its control of physical training to the official school period, but it must demand that, after leaving school and while the adolescent body is still developing, the boy continues this training.

For on such proper physical development success in afterlife largely depends. It is stupid to think that the right of the State to supervise the education of its young citizens suddenly comes to an end the moment they leave school and recommences only with military service. This right is a duty, and as such it must continue uninterruptedly.

The present State, which does not interest itself in developing healthy men, has criminally neglected this duty. It leaves our contemporary youth to be corrupted on the streets and in the brothels, instead of keeping hold of the reins and continuing the physical training of these youths up to the time when they are grown into healthy young men and women.

For the present it is a matter of indifference what form the State chooses for carrying on this training. The essential matter is that it should be developed and that the most suitable ways of doing so should be investigated.

The People’s State will have to consider the physical training of the youth after the school period just as much a public duty as their intellectual training; and this training will have to be carried out through public institutions.

Its general lines can be a preparation for subsequent service in the army. And then it will no longer be the task of the army to teach the young recruit the most elementary drill regulations. In fact the army will no longer have to deal with recruits in the present sense of the word, but it will rather have to transform into a soldier the youth whose bodily prowess has been already fully trained.

In the People’s State the army will no longer be obliged to teach boys how to walk and stand erect, but it will be the final and supreme school of patriotic education. In the army the young recruit will learn the art of bearing arms, but at the same time he will be equipped for his other duties in later life.

The supreme aim of military education must always be to achieve that which was attributed to the old army as its highest merit: namely, that through his military schooling the boy must be transformed into a man, that he must not only learn to obey but also acquire the fundamentals that will enable him one day to command. He must learn to remain silent not only when he is rightly rebuked but also when he is wrongly rebuked.

Furthermore, on the self-consciousness of his own strength and on the basis of that ESPRIT DE CORPS which inspires him and his comrades, he must become convinced that he belongs to a people who are invincible.

After he has completed his military training two certificates shall be handed to the soldier. The one will be his diploma as a citizen of the State, a juridical document which will enable him to take part in public affairs. The second will be an attestation of his physical health, which guarantees his fitness for marriage.

The People’s State will have to direct the education of girls just as that of boys and according to the same fundamental principles. Here again special importance must be given to physical training, and only after that must the importance of spiritual and mental training be taken into account.

In the education of the girl the final goal always to be kept in mind is that she is one day to be a mother.

It is only in the second place that the People’s State must busy itself with the training of character, using all the means adapted to that purpose.

Of course the essential traits of the individual character are already there fundamentally before any education takes place. A person who is fundamentally egoistic will always remain fundamentally egoistic, and the idealist will always remain fundamentally an idealist.

Besides those, however, who already possess a definite stamp of character there are millions of people with characters that are indefinite and vague. The born delinquent will always remain a delinquent, but numerous people who show only a certain tendency to commit criminal acts may become useful members of the community if rightly trained; whereas, on the other hand, weak and unstable characters may easily become evil elements if the system of education has been bad.

During the War it was often lamented that our people could be so little reticent. This failing made it very difficult to keep even highly important secrets from the knowledge of the enemy.

But let us ask this question: What did the German educational system do in pre-War times to teach the Germans to be discreet? Did it not very often happen in schooldays that the little tell-tale was preferred to his companions who kept their mouths shut?

Is it not true that then, as well as now, complaining about others was considered praiseworthy ‘candour’, while silent discretion was taken as obstinacy?

Has any attempt ever been made to teach that discretion is a precious and manly virtue? No, for such matters are trifles in the eyes of our educators. But these trifles cost our State innumerable millions in legal expenses; for 90% of all the processes for defamation and such like charges arise only from a lack of discretion.

Remarks that are made without any sense of responsibility are thoughtlessly repeated from mouth to mouth; and our economic welfare is continually damaged because important methods of production are thus disclosed. Secret preparations for our national defence are rendered illusory because our people have never learned the duty of silence.

They repeat everything they happen to hear. In times of war such talkative habits may even cause the loss of battles and therefore may contribute essentially to the unsuccessful outcome of a campaign. Here, as in other matters, we may rest assured that adults cannot do what they have not learnt to do in youth.

A teacher must not try to discover the wild tricks of the boys by encouraging the evil practice of tale-bearing. Young people form a sort of State among themselves and face adults with a certain solidarity. That is quite natural.

The ties which unite the ten-year boys to one another are stronger and more natural than their relationship to adults. A boy who tells on his comrades commits an act of treason and shows a bent of character which is, to speak bluntly, similar to that of a man who commits high treason. Such a boy must not be classed as ‘good’, ‘reliable’, and so on, but rather as one with undesirable traits of character.

It may be rather convenient for the teacher to make use of such unworthy tendencies in order to help his own work, but by such an attitude the germ of a moral habit is sown in young hearts and may one day show fatal consequences. It has happened more often than once that a young informer developed into a big scoundrel.

This is only one example among many. The deliberate training of fine and noble traits of character in our schools to-day is almost negative. In the future much more emphasis will have to be laid on this side of our educational work.

Loyalty, self-sacrifice and discretion are virtues which a great nation must possess. The teaching and development of these in the school is a more important matter than many others things now included in the curriculum.

To make the children give up habits of complaining and whining and howling when they are hurt, etc., also belongs to this part of their training. If the educational system fails to teach the child at an early age to endure pain and injury without complaining we cannot be surprised if at a later age, when the boy has grown to be the man and is, for example, in the trenches, the postal service is used for nothing else than to send home letters of weeping and complaint.

If our youths, during their years in the primary schools, had had their minds crammed with a little less knowledge, and if instead they had been better taught how to be masters of themselves, it would have served us well during the years 1914-1918.

In its educational system the People’s State will have to attach the highest importance to the development of character, hand-in-hand with physical training. Many more defects which our national organism shows at present could be at least ameliorated, if not completely eliminated, by education of the right kind.

Extreme importance should be attached to the training of will-power and the habit of making firm decisions, also the habit of being always ready to accept responsibilities.

In the training of our old army the principle was in vogue that any order is always better than no order. Applied to our youth this principle ought to take the form that any answer is better than no answer.

The fear of replying, because one fears to be wrong, should be considered more humiliating than giving the wrong reply. On this simple and primitive basis our youth should be trained to have the courage to act.