"The Good Earth"

In an obscure last stand against Hitlerism, many German parents have been forbidding their children to join the Hitler Youths and German Maidens who are excused from school one day each week for "party activities." Last week such parents sighed despairingly as blunt Minister of Education Bernhard Rust decreed that every German schoolchild without exception must study one day each week and take examinations on the anti-Jewish, un-Christian and pro-Nazi propaganda works of Dr. Alfred Rosenberg, august Supervisor of the Intellectual and Spiritual Training of the Nazi Party.

No Jew is Dr. Rosenberg who boasts "I am a Balt!" and was indeed born near the Baltic Sea. Emotional, he edits Adolf Hitler's personal newsorgan, Volkischer Beobachter. In politics his principal idea is the "Rosenberg Plan" under which Germany and Poland would make war on Russia, both seizing great hunks of Soviet territory and Germany receiving the Polish Corridor as a gift from her grateful and victorious ally. As an inkling of what will soon be taught, Dr. Rosenberg announced officially last week in the organ of the Hitler Youth:

"For Germans the Holy Land is not in Palestine but our Holy Land is the place, wherever it may be, upon which Germans have descended. Our holy places are certain castles on the Rhine, the good earth of Lower Saxony and the Prussian fortress of Marienburg."

While the Nation was digesting this, German pedagogs confided to foreign correspondents, under promise not to be quoted by name, their grave doubts as to the future of that pedantic, elephantine form of learning which has always proudly called itself German Scholarship with a capital S. The only way to produce such Scholars, the savants moaned last week, is to keep German schoolchildren grinding at their lessons six days out of every week and to hound them so vigorously that suicides just before examination time have long been a German academic commonplace.

Since the Fatherland's teachers are stuck so deep in the rut of a six-day teaching week, Minister Rust finally made a concession to German pedagogics. Though children will sit under their regular instructors only five days in each calendar week, their lessons will be assigned on a complicated basis of six days, the six-day study week beginning on a different day of each calendar week. Only in Germany could such a system be installed for the reason given by Dr. Rust: greater efficiency.

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