School among the Ruins

One purpose, or one hope, of the U.S. occupation of Germany is to teach the Germans the ways of democracy. Are the Germans learning? The ten-man U.S. education mission to Germany, in a 24,000-word report last week, offered faint praise for what had been accomplished so far, faint hope of an early end to the job. The educators (among them American Council on Education President George Zook, Theologian Reinhold Niebuhr) found nothing to "encourage the hope of a quick fulfillment of the responsibilities which our nation . . . has assumed."

Everywhere they saw young Germans, eager to rebuild, struggling against a mountain of wreckage, physical and spiritual, left by the Nazis. At the partially rebuilt Technische Hochschule at Darmstadt, students took lecture notes on their knees because there were no desks; many spent their vacations last summer recovering laboratory equipment from the rubble. Nazi book-burnings and Allied bombs had combined to decimate the textbook supply; at Frankfurt alone, half a million books were lost during raids. The circulating library of the University of Munich is in one small basement room.

Germany has a desperate shortage of competent teachers. The U.S. Military Government's "rough-&-ready" screening procedure, says the report, had eliminated --sometimes unfairly--more than half the German teachers who survived the war. Result: approved teachers are generally second-rate and getting old (average age in Greater Hesse: 52).

Worse than the dearth of equipment and teachers, said the educators, was the continuance (passively approved by the U.S. Army) of the traditional German educational caste system. After the fourth grade of elementary school, only 10% of German children have the money or social position to get into secondary schools (roughly equivalent to U.S. prep schools); the other 90% get four years' vocational training, then become Germany's butchers, bakers & candlestick makers. A majority of German children have to choose their vocations before they are 14--and stick to their choice. The mission urged the U.S. to make all German secondary schools tuition-free, root out the old caste distinctions. Said the report: "This system has cultivated attitudes of superiority in one small group and inferiority in the majority of the members of German society, making [them perfect material] upon which authoritarian leadership has thrived."

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