Content area
Full Text
Lisa Pine, Education in Nazi Germany (Oxford; New York: Berg, 2010)
The use of educational institutions for the ideological indoctrination, political mobilization, and military preparation of young people represented a core strategy of the National Socialist regime. At the same time, education offers a distinct policy window through which one can observe the functioning of the Nazi regime itself. Indeed, few policy areas demonstrate more fully the con- flict in the Third Reich between practical considerations and ideological aims, or offer opportunities to assess streams of continuity and change between the Nazi period and the eras that preceded and succeeded it.
As a topic of study, however, education has been relatively (and some- what surprisingly) underrepresented in the recent historiography of the Nazi period. Lisa Pine's slender but significant volume Education in Nazi Germany thus marks a welcome contribution. As Pine accurately notes early in the work, "Education is fundamental to our entire macro-view of the Third Reich" (1). Education is broadly defined here to include not only schools and universities, but the range of institutions related to the socializa- tion of young people more generally. Such was the view of Nazi educational theorists themselves, as Pine points out, who viewed party organizations as extensions of formal schooling. Thus, while the work examines structural and curricular issues related to traditional primary and secondary schools and universities, it also considers the elite party schools, the Hitler Youth (Hitlerjugend), and the League of German Girls (Bund Deutscher Mädel).1
The book is organized into six core chapters. The first provides the his- torical background to education in the Third Reich and examines the extent to which Nazi policy marked a continuation of the völkisch and nationalist tendencies in German education that prior to 1933 had coexisted and conflicted with both the Humboldtian humanist tradition-reflected most strongly in the Gymnasium-and the progressive tendencies of Weimar reformers. The second chapter considers the role played by Hitler in shap- ing Nazi education policy, the organizational framework of educational pol- icymaking, and the changes to the structure of schools and universities....