Modifications to the Educational System

First Modification in the Educational System: Simplification

The People’s State must reconstruct our educational system to embrace only what is essential as part of an allround education.

Beyond this, it will provide more advanced teaching in the various subjects for those who want to specialize in them.

He should study exhaustively and in detail only that subject in which he intends to work during the rest of his life.

A general instruction in all subjects should be obligatory, and specialization should be left to the choice of the individual.

In this way, the scholastic programme would be shortened. Thus, several school hours would be gained which could be utilized for physical training and character training, in will-power, the capacity for making practical judgments, decisions, etc.

The little account taken by our school training today, especially in the secondary schools, of the callings that have to be followed in after life is demonstrated by the fact that men who are destined for the same calling in life are educated in three different kinds of schools.

What is of decisive importance is general education only and not the special teaching. When special knowledge is needed it cannot be given in the curriculum of our secondary schools as they stand to-day.

Therefore the People’s State will one day have to abolish such half-measures.

Second Modification in the Educational System: Ideals

In our materialistic epoch, our scientific education gives emphasis on what is real and practical such as applied mathematics, physics, chemistry, etc.

But it is perilous to base the general culture of a nation on these subjects. On the contrary, that general culture should always be:

• directed towards ideals.
• founded on the humanist disciplines
• giving only the groundwork of further specialized instruction in the various practical sciences.

Otherwise, we gain technical knowledge but sacrifice those forces that are more important for preserving the nation.

In the historical department, the study of ancient history should not be omitted.

Roman history, along general lines, is and will remain the best teacher for our own time and also for the future.

The ideal of Hellenic culture should be preserved in all its marvellous beauty.

The differences between the various peoples should not prevent us from recognizing the community of race which unites them on a higher plane.

The conflict of our times is one that is being waged around great objectives.

A civilization is fighting for its existence. It is a civilization that is the product of thousands of years of historical development, and the Greek as well as the German forms part of it.

A clear-cut division must be made between general culture and the special branches.

Today, the special cultures threaten to devote themselves exclusively to the service of Mammon. To counterbalance this, general culture should be preserved, at least in its ideal forms.

Industrial and technical progress, trade and commerce, can flourish only so long as a folk community is inspired by ideals.

Having ideals is the preliminary condition for a flourishing development of those enterprises.

That condition is not created by a spirit of materialist egotism but by a spirit of self-denial and the joy of giving one’s self in the service of others.

The system of education which prevails today sees its principal object in pumping into young people that knowledge which will help them to make their way in life.

This principle is expressed in the following terms: “The young man must one day become a useful member of human society.”

By that phrase they mean the ability to gain an honest daily livelihood.

The superficial training in the duties of good citizenship, which he acquires merely as an accidental thing, has very weak foundations.

For in itself the State represents only a form, and therefore it is difficult to train people to look upon this form as the ideal which they will have to serve and towards which they must feel responsible. A form can be too easily broken.

But the current idea of the State is obscure.

Therefore, there is nothing but the usual stereotyped ‘patriotic’ training.

In the old Germany the greatest emphasis was placed on the divine right of the small and even the smallest potentates.

The way in which this divine right was formulated and presented was never very clever and often very stupid.

Because of the large numbers of those small potentates, it was impossible to give adequate biographical accounts of the really great personalities that shed their lustre on the history of the German people.

The result was that the broad masses received a very inadequate knowledge of German history. Here, too, the great lines of development were missing.

In such a way no real national enthusiasm could be aroused.

Our educational system was incapable of selecting historical personages which the German people could be proud to look upon as their own.

• It could have united the nation by the ties of common heritage.

Pettifogging dynastic patriotism was more acceptable and more easily tolerated than the glowing fire of a supreme national pride.

Monarchist patriotism terminated in Associations of Veterans, whereas passionate national patriotism might have opened new roads

Since the revolution broke out in Germany, the monarchist patriotism was extinguished.

The purpose of teaching history was to merely add to the stock of objective knowledge.

The German people would not have stood on the battlefield for 4.5 years to fight under the battle slogan ‘For the Republic’.

Third Modification in the Educational System: Indoctrination

The People’s State must realize that the sciences can also promote a spirit of pride in the nation. The history of the world and of civilization as a whole must be taught in the light of this principle.

An inventor must appear great not only as an inventor but also, and even more so, as a member of the nation.

The admiration aroused by the contemplation of a great achievement must be transformed into a feeling of pride and satisfaction that a man of one’s own race has been chosen to accomplish it. But out of the abundance of great names in German history the greatest will have to be selected and presented to our young generation in such a way as to become solid pillars of strength to support the national spirit.

The subject matter should be systematically organized from the standpoint of this principle.

The teaching should be orientated so that the boy or girl, after leaving school, will be a whole-hearted German, not:

• a semi-pacifist
• a democrat or something of that kind.

This national feeling should be sincere from the very beginning and not a mere pretence. The following fundamental and inflexible principle should be impressed on the young brain while it is yet malleable.

The man who loves his nation can prove the sincerity of this sentiment only by being ready to make sacrifices for the nation’s welfare.

There is no such thing as a national sentiment which is directed towards personal interests. And there is no such thing as a nationalism that embraces only certain classes.

Hurrahing proves nothing and does not confer the right to call oneself national if behind that shout there is no sincere preoccupation for the conservation of the nation’s well-being. One can be proud of one’s people only if there is no class left of which one need to be ashamed.

When one half of a nation is sunk in misery and worn out by hard distress, or even depraved or degenerate, that nation presents such an unattractive picture that nobody can feel proud to belong to it.

It is only when a nation is sound in all its members, physically and morally, that the joy of belonging to it can properly be intensified to the supreme feeling which we call national pride.

But this pride, in its highest form, can be felt only by those who know the greatness of their nation.

The spirit of nationalism and a feeling for social justice must be fused into one sentiment in the hearts of the youth. Then a day will come when a nation of citizens will arise which will be welded together through a common love and a common pride that shall be invincible and indestructible for ever.

The dread of chauvinism, which is a symptom of our time, is a sign of its impotence.

Since our epoch not only lacks everything in the nature of exuberant energy but even finds such a manifestation disagreeable, fate will never elect it for the accomplishment of any great deeds.

For the greatest changes that have taken place on this earth would have been inconceivable if they had not been inspired by ardent and even hysterical passions, but only by the bourgeois virtues of peacefulness and order.

One thing is certain: our world is facing a great revolution. The only question is whether the outcome will be propitious for the Aryan portion of mankind or whether the everlasting Jew will profit by it.

By educating the young generation along the right lines, the People’s State will have to see to it that a generation of mankind is formed which will be adequate to this supreme combat that will decide the destinies of the world.

That nation will conquer which will be the first to take this road.

The whole organization of education and training which the People’s State is to build up must take as its crowning task the work of instilling into the hearts and brains of the youth entrusted to it the racial instinct and understanding of the racial idea. No boy or girl must leave school without having attained a clear insight into the meaning of racial purity and the importance of maintaining the racial blood unadulterated.

Thus the first indispensable condition for the preservation of our race will have been established and thus the future cultural progress of our people will be assured.

For in the last analysis all physical and mental training would be in vain unless it served an entity which is ready and determined to carry on its own existence and maintain its own characteristic qualities.

If it were otherwise, something would result which we Germans have cause to regret already, without perhaps having hitherto recognized the extent of the tragic calamity.

We should be doomed to remain also in the future only manure for civilization. And that not in the banal sense of the contemporary bourgeois mind, which sees in a lost fellow member of our people only a lost citizen, but in a sense which we should have painfully to recognize: namely, that our racial blood would be destined to disappear.

By continually mixing with other races we might lift them from their former lower level of civilization to a higher grade; but we ourselves should descend for ever from the heights we had reached.

Finally, from the racial standpoint this training also must find its culmination in the military service. The term of military service is to be a final stage of the normal training which the average German receives.

While the People’s State attaches the greatest importance to physical and mental training, it has also to consider, and no less importantly, the task of selecting men for the service of the State itself.

This important matter is passed over lightly at the present time. Generally the children of parents who are for the time being in higher situations are in their turn considered worthy of a higher education. Here talent plays a subordinate part.

But talent can be estimated only relatively. Though in general culture he may be inferior to the city child, a peasant boy may be more talented than the son of a family that has occupied high positions through many generations. But the superior culture of the city child has in itself nothing to do with a greater or lesser degree of talent; for this culture has its roots in the more copious mass of impressions which arise from the more varied education and the surroundings among which this child lives.

If the intelligent son of peasant parents were educated from childhood in similar surroundings his intellectual accomplishments would be quite otherwise. In our day there is only one sphere where the family in which a person has been born means less than his innate gifts.

That is the sphere of art. Here, where a person cannot just ’learn,’ but must have innate gifts that later on may undergo a more or less happy development (in the sense of a wise development of what is already there), money and parental property are of no account. This is a good proof that genius is not necessarily connected with the higher social strata or with wealth.

Not rarely the greatest artists come from poor families. And many a boy from the country village has eventually become a celebrated master.

It does not say much for the mental acumen of our time that advantage is not taken of this truth for the sake of our whole intellectual life. The opinion is advanced that this principle, though undoubtedly valid in the field of art, has not the same validity in regard to what are called the applied sciences.

A man can be trained to a certain amount of mechanical dexterity, just as a poodle can be taught incredible tricks by a clever master.

But such training does not bring the animal to use his intelligence in order to carry out those tricks. And the same holds good in regard to man. It is possible to teach men, irrespective of talent or no talent, to go through certain scientific exercises, but in such cases the results are quite as inanimate and mechanical as in the case of the animal.

It would even be possible to force a person of mediocre intelligence, by means of a severe course of intellectual drilling, to acquire more than the average amount of knowledge; but that knowledge would remain sterile. The result would be a man who might be a walking dictionary of knowledge but who will fail miserably on every critical occasion in life and at every juncture where vital decisions have to be taken.

Such people need to be drilled specially for every new and even most insignificant task and will never be capable of contributing in the least to the general progress of mankind.

Knowledge that is merely drilled into people can at best qualify them to fill government positions under our present regime.

It goes without saying that, among the sum total of individuals who make up a nation, gifted people are always to be found in every sphere of life. It is also quite natural that the value of knowledge will be all the greater the more vitally the dead mass of learning is animated by the innate talent of the individual who possesses it. Creative work in this field can be done only through the marriage of knowledge and talent.

One example will suffice to show how much our contemporary world is at fault in this matter. From time to time our illustrated papers publish, for the edification of the German philistine, the news that in some quarter or other of the globe, and for the first time in that locality, a Negro has become a lawyer, a teacher, a pastor, even a grand opera tenor or something else of that kind.

While the bourgeois blockhead stares with amazed admiration at the notice that tells him how marvellous are the achievements of our modern educational technique, the more cunning Jew sees in this fact a new proof to be utilized for the theory with which he wants to infect the public, namely that all men are equal.

It does not dawn on the murky bourgeois mind that the fact which is published for him is a sin against reason itself, that it is an act of criminal insanity to train a being who is only an anthropoid by birth until the pretence can be made that he has been turned into a lawyer; while, on the other hand, millions who belong to the most civilized races have to remain in positions which are unworthy of their cultural level. The bourgeois mind does not realize that it is a sin against the will of the eternal Creator to allow hundreds of thousands of highly gifted people to remain floundering in the swamp of proletarian misery while Hottentots and Zulus are drilled to fill positions in the intellectual professions. For here we have the product only of a drilling technique, just as in the case of the performing dog. If the same amount of care and effort were applied among intelligent races each individual would become a thousand times more capable in such matters.

This state of affairs would become intolerable if a day should arrive when it no longer refers to exceptional cases. But the situation is already intolerable where talent and natural gifts are not taken as decisive factors in qualifying for the right to a higher education. It is indeed intolerable to think that year after year hundreds of thousands of young people without a single vestige of talent are deemed worthy of a higher education, while other hundreds of thousands who possess high natural gifts have to go without any sort of higher schooling at all. The practical loss thus caused to the nation is incalculable. If the number of important discoveries which have been made in America has grown considerably in recent years one of the reasons is that the number of gifted persons belonging to the lowest social classes who were given a higher education in that country is proportionately much larger than in Europe.

A stock of knowledge packed into the brain will not suffice for the making of discoveries. What counts here is only that knowledge which is illuminated by natural talent. But with us at the present time no value is placed on such gifts. Only good school reports count.

Here is another educative work that is waiting for the People’s State to do. It will not be its task to assure a dominant influence to a certain social class already existing, but it will be its duty to attract the most competent brains in the total mass of the nation and promote them to place and honour.

It is not merely the duty of the State to give to the average child a certain definite education in the primary school, but it is also its duty to open the road to talent in the proper direction. And above all, it must open the doors of the higher schools under the State to talent of every sort, no matter in what social class it may appear. This is an imperative necessity; for thus alone will it be possible to develop a talented body of public leaders from the class which represents learning that in itself is only a dead mass.