NAZI authorities had a definitive approach to education. For the NAZI's the student was an object. Education was no longer to be a matter of personal intellectual development, but rather to prepare children to serve the new National Socialist state.
Education was not to inspire intellectual thought or cause children to question and seek answers to complicated issues. Rather the schools were designed mould children and have them unquestionably accept NAZI Party doctrine.
Teachers were encouraged to in effect forget facts. They were to teach "right" attitudes or "character" through feel-good experiences: NAZI education gave great importance to the cult of "experience" as being of greater importance than academic study.
Unlike knowledge which involved intellectual thought, experience involved "feeling" which the NAZI's cultivated.
A new curriculum was developed to make it clear what should and should not be taught in schools. The previously highly academic German approach was shifted to a more affective (feeling-centered) program rather than cognitive learning. Students were not slow to learn what was important to earn the graduation certificates. Many concluded that they could simply drift through their school years and obtain their school-leaving certificate even only a minimal intellectual efforts. One Geman teacher noted, "... those pupils who are in positions of leadership ... often display unmannerly behavior and laziness at school. in general, it must be said that school discipline has declined to an alarming extent..." [Noakes and Pridham, p. 429.]
References
Noakes, J. and G. Pridham, ed. Nazism: A History in Documents and Eyewitness Accounts, 1919-1945, (Department of History and Archaeology at the University of Exeter, 1983).
N.B. If you want to improve educational standards it is the STYLE of teaching that needs to be changed.
Not more money.
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