Text Version


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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
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