The much admired school system of 19th-century Germany served as a model for the educational systems of many other countries, including Britain and the United States. In this illuminating study of German primary schools, Lamberti examines an educational tradition that was the object of wide emulation, but which was often misinterpreted by its admirers. Lamberti also explores the political significance of German educational policies in the Kulturkampf, in the suppression of Polish nationalism in the eastern provinces, and more generally in the struggle between the competing strands of liberalism and authoritarianism in the German state.
Enter ing the training seminaries for elementary school teaching in large numbers were the sons of small farmers, artisans, and shopkeepers as well as subaltern civil servants. Protestant women teachers generally came from a higher stratum of the bourgeoisie than the men in the pro fession; Catholic women teachers were more like their male colleagues in family background. 4
Even before the Reichstag defeated the renewal of the law banning the Social Democratic party in January 1890, Emperor William II was ready to discard Bismarck's policy of repression and to use pedagogy as a weapon against socialism. In an order sent to the Prussian State Ministry on 1 May 1889, the king of Prussia and German emperor demanded that the schools make a greater effort to refute socialist theories and to impart to the pupils a "healthy" view of society and the state. He proposed that the instruction of history cover more closely the modern era and especially the social policies of the Hohenzollern dynasty, from the abolition of serfdom to the sickness and old age insurance legislation of the 1880s, "in order to show that the rulers of Prussia have always considered it their duty to improve the living conditions of the laboring classes" and that "in the future workers can expect justice and security only under the protection and care of the king at the head of the state." The emperor wanted the teachers to describe the menace of revolutionary socialism in such dark colors that the pupils would be "filled with revulsion and fear."! This essay will examine the antisocialist pedagogical strategy of Emperor William in practice and, in particular, the responses of the elementary school teachers themselves to the Cabinet Order. The emperor's words and the directive for the implementation of the Cabinet Order issued by the Prussian Minister of Education on 18 October 1890 do Marjorie Lamberti is the Charles A. Dana Professor of History at Middlebury College in Vermont. The author expresses her gratitude to the Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst for a generous stipend to do research in the Federal Republic of Germany in the fall of 1988.
In the Third Reich a high percentage of the civil servants in the cadres of functionaries of the National Socialist Party on the local and district levels were teachers. It is thus not surprising that some historians who studied the elementary school teaching profession in the Weimar Republic began their research with assumptions about the “ideological affinities” of teachers to fascism and discussed “the specific predispositions that made it easy for them to identify with National Socialism.” The German Teachers' Association, one scholar wrote, “proved to be more a precursor than an opponent of fascism.” At its national congress in May 1932, another historian related, the representatives of the chapters voted for a policy which, in effect, abandoned the democratic republic and “indirectly helped those political forces that would create a dictatorship in Germany within a year.” In 1932 and 1933, on the other hand, recruiters for the National Socialist Teachers’ League often complained about “hard and difficult soil” and “unpenetrable” regions.
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