-5- over all media for the dissemination of public information. This proposal is designed to insure against the further dissemination of Nazi propaganda, to facilitate the Control Council's presentation of instructions and information to the German people, and, as security permits, to allow responsible Germans to carry on an orderly discussion of political reform. The Department of State wishes to emphasize the importance of placing this control function under the authority of the Control Council rather than leaving it to the discretion of the zonal commanders. b. Educational Policy. - The Department of State recommends a system of Control over German education designed to eradicate Nazi doctrines and to inculcate democratic values. To this end it is recommended, as the first step, that the German schools, beginning at the elementary level, be reopened as soon as mili- tary considerations permit and when objectionable text-books and teaching personnel can be satisfactorily replaced. The Department believes that it should be the policy of military government to work as unobtrusively as possible through existing German educational machinery after Nazi influences have been re- moved, and likewise to leave the initiative of positive educa- tional reform to the Germans themselves, subject to review by the Control Council. It would, therefore, oppose Allied imposi- tion of new curricula and the introduction of foreign teachers. The desirability of keeping changes in German education to a common procedure throughout the Reich points to the necessity of maintaining, at least temporarily, the national machinery of educational supervision. Maintenance of this machinery would simplify the problem of holding to a uniform policy as well as the task of systematic control. It is deemed injudicious to return education to a decentralized basis until more rational units of federal government can be worked out than have existed heretofore and until the need for close supervision is less insistent. The Department believes it urgent to reopen the schools as promptly as possible in order that the younger children can be looked after and the youth can be kept from the streets and subject to discipline which may be otherwise lacking because of the break-up of families and the dissolution of the Nazi youth organizations. In the Department's opinion the Control Council's role must be largely in terms of prohibiting certain things and in con- senting to changes proposed by the Germans. A new direction of German education and a new positive content will necessarily be the work of German educators and the victors can do little more than encourage the adoption of a set of beliefs and objectives to take the place of the perverted concepts now being inculcated. The |