Remember that scene in Footloose when a group of fanatic community members starts burning books? One of the reasons why the Reverend reacts with horror is because book burnings in a post-WWII era immediately bring to mind images of Nazi Germany, where giant bonfires of books became emblematic of the Nazi desire to control every aspect of German thought and culture.
In The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, Shirer shows us that the Nazi grip on German education went even further than the burning of books. As Hitler made clear, his goal was to ensure that every German youth grew up soaked in Nazi ideology, and that every German adult was equally indoctrinated.
For all the "inferior" species—Slavs, Jews, etc.—education was to be discouraged. All they'd be doing is slave labor, and education would just make them more troublesome. Jewish kids were thrown out of schools in Germany with the Nürnberg Laws and Jewish professors kicked out of the universities. The Nazis recognized the power of education and controlled it like they did everything else.
Questions About Education
- What was the reasoning behind the Nazi book burnings?
- In Shirer's view, why did German universities become hotbeds of Nazi ideology, rather than places of intellectual resistance?
- In Shirer's account, what options did average Germans have if they wanted to see the world without the distorting lens of Nazi propaganda?
Chew on This
The Nazis figured that if you can reach kids at an impressionable age, they'll believe whatever you teach them. The children are our future, so get them early and you'll have a thousand-year Reich.
Hitler focused on controlling education because was one of those impressionable kids. He read racist propaganda as a young man and turned into a rabid bigot.