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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