What Lessons for Losers?

One great United Nations concern is the future of Axis educational systems. Britain's Baron Vansittart of Denham advocates supervision of German schools by 1,000 or so United Nations inspectors, who would aim to raise a generation of woolly lambs fit to lie down with any lion. Last week a similar idea was expressed in Princeton's Public Opinion Quarterly by Gregor Athalwin Ziemer, who once ran the American Colony School in Berlin (1928-39), then wrote Education for Death (Hitler's Children on the screen). Said Ziemer :

"The supervision, the actual administration of the German schools, at least for five years, should be in the hands of American and British educators who not only know the German language but also the German psychology and what has been going on in the Nazi schools. . . . German youth would take to our American books, and teaching methods-- provided there is discipline and firmness."

Earlier a Manhattan conference of U.S. schoolmen had heard Philadelphia's School Superintendent Alexander Stoddard declare:

"If [necessary] let the [Axis] schools be closed until [trustworthy] teachers can be provided. . . . For the peace of the world it is better that the children of Germany and Japan have no schooling for a while than to have their minds twisted again."

Counterblast. To this kind of talk, Teachers College Dean William Fletcher Russell has been giving angry rebuttals before educators' gatherings. Russell favors helping devastated lands rebuild their school systems, but he would send pencils and blank paper rather than lessons written by the winners. Says he:

"The conduct of education is not an international matter. . . . The job of carrying educational ideas across national frontiers . . . requires considerable tact, sympathy and experience. . . . With the exception of the most obvious cases, a foreigner cannot tell whether teaching is warlike or not. Of course, it is plain in the goose step, the maps, the warlike mottoes: but when it comes to the more delicate emphases, the problem is so difficult [as to be] impossible."

Above all, Dean Russell offers a Heraclitean hope of eternal flux in man's affairs, recalls that school reforms have often come after defeats. The Dean fears the U.S. itself may be least progressive: he sees a growing trend toward medievalism, scholasticism and general educational reaction.

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