by the time they were ten. When achild reached that age the decisionwas made whether he would continuethere or be transferred to one of thecomplicated network of higher schools.
Before the war, ninety per cent re-mained in the common schools for an-other four years, and then some wenton to vocational or trade schools, andeventually took their places in factoriesand offices, or on farms. The privilegedten per cent were- and still are- di-vided into two groups. About half ofthem those from middle- income fam-ilies go to the Intermediary Schools( Mittelschule) for a six- year coursethat prepares them for skilled andsemiskilled work and the lower ad-ministrative posts in industry andtrade. The other half- those whoseparents are at least fairly well- heeled-go into a nine- year advanced course.This course alone leads to the univer-sities. From the universities, one couldmove into the civil service and highgovernment, the officer corps of theArmy, high teaching and church posts,the bigger jobs in industry. To thesedistinguished and lucrative fields, therewas no other path.
The United States has been so pre-occupied with helping German indus-try that it appears to have forgottento do anything much about the Ger man mind, and the molds in whichthe German national character hasbeen formed. We have told ourselveswe are putting first things first, andin the process we seem to have neg-lected coming to grips with the feudalsentries that have stood for generationsat the strategic passes to the German mind, and blocked every effort tobreak down the worship of authority.
Most of these facts are contained ina remarkable report by an American educational mission sent to Germany at the end of the war, headed by
KINDER
KIRCHE
KÜCHE
The Reporter, October 11, 1949
George F. Zook . It created somethingof a stir when it was issued in 1946.Reading it in 1949 was a peculiar ex-perience, and my feelings were a littlelike Wordsworth's in Yarrow Visitedthe sense of a once- familiar image thathad been all but wiped out by later ex-perience, and had left only a few mem-ory- traces, which were now revived.Here was the record of a group ofpeople who had dared to utter sometruths about Germany , which are nowtoo inconvenient to stress. It said thatapparently Nazism was not an acci-dent or an aberration, but had deeproots in German history and life; thateconomic reconstruction is futile with-out educational, moral, and socialreconstruction; that the national char-acter of a people is conditioned largelyby its cultural milieu; that the demo-cratic spirit in Germany has beenpoisoned at its sources by the principlesof class privilege and caste divisionthat originate in the family and havebeen frozen into the school system.
It is fundamental that Nazism wasnot a doctrine that suddenly sprangup after the defeat of 1918; it was theconsummation of a system of societythat sprouted under the semi- mysticalGoths and the Teutonic barbarians,and burst into sinister bloom underFrederick the Great and Bismarck.Modern Germans - as Hitler knew sowell- prefer to glorify Niebelungenmilitarism rather than the short- livedtradition of freedom, which was stifledshortly after 1849, and which theWeimar Republic failed to revive.
As I read the Zook Report I gotinto a wholly different frame of mindfrom the one which prevailed in thepart of Germany I saw this summer,among both the German officials andthe occupation authorities. I checkedthe dates again. The report had beensent to General Clay on September20, 1946. Those last months of 1946were a watershed in American think-ing about Germany .
In 1946 Clay was still determinedto break down one of the great caste-walls in German society- the systemof cartels. In 1946 he reprimandedGeneral Draper for not following thebasic directives on decartelization. Butin 1947 everything had changed, andby 1948 Clay had adopted Draper'sposition.
Just as breaking up the cartels wasde- emphasized, so was breaking up
caste in education. A group of edu-cational administrators- includingHerman Wells and Alonzo Grace- hadkept making appeals for more fundsand a larger staff in the educationalbranch of Military Government, buttheir pleas met no response. The five-point program of educational reformsthat the Zook Report recommended-concrete methods for breaking up thecaste divisions in the schools, and forgiving all German children access toeducational opportunity- were ap-parently relegated to some vague" laterphase." Whenever action was finallytaken, the German opposition hadbeen given time to organize for ob-struction. In the early days of theoccupation- 1945 and 1946- muchtime was spent in academic debate onwhether reforms should be" imposed."The only period during which sweep-ing changes could have been madeand would have been accepted wasthus talked away.
There have been almost no reforms,
as far as I have been able to find out,adopted by the German Länder in thefield of educational structure in ourzone. All that the recent American educational administrators in Germany have been able to do has been to" ad-vise" the Germans and seek to leadthem gently into educational democ-racy. Even so good an educator asAlonzo Grace has prefaced his reportswith the statement that the Americansdo not place any emphasis on struc-tural changes in the German schoolsystem. There have been signs thatin Hesse and in Bremen more advancedideas have begun to make an im-pact on the Germans , and in someplaces the idea of free tuition andtextbooks, at least, has been reluc-tantly accepted. But the fact is thatthe German educational system in theUnited States Zone today is in no es-sential way different from what it wasat the time of the Zook Report. Withthe emergence of the German stateand the withdrawal of military gov-ernment, it is notable that educationis not one of the fields in which evena slight supervisory power has beenretained by the American High Com-missioner. Indeed, education has notbeen mentioned in the occupation
statutes.
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