“TARANAKI CENTRAL PRESS.” THURSDAY, DECEMBER 3, 1936. FUTURE NAZI LEADERS.

Taranaki Central Press, Volume IV, Issue 300, 3 December 1936, Page 4

“TARANAKI CENTRAL PRESS.” THURSDAY, DECEMBER 3, 1936. FUTURE NAZI LEADERS.

There is no more remarkable feature of the German nalioaal system of education, efficient as it is in most respects, than the special schools for the most capable boys. In most other countries the capable students are expected to come to the top by some natural process. In Germany the system insists on the unusually clever boys brine; singled out for education in institutions set apart for them. There are twelve of these schools, and the pupils vary in number from two hundred to four hundred and fifty. Out of a population of sixty or seventy millions, therefore, only some three* thousand boys are selected for the special training, and the conclusion is inevitable that these boys are intended to be the future leaders of the nation. 1 hey have to be physically fit as well as mentally fit. Mr. Christopher Sidgwick, who described the special schools in a recent book, says that the scholars are selected from no'one class. They may come from any home, and the only qualification for admission is that they must have shown great natural abilities in their earlier schooling. No money will buy admission. The parents who can afford to pay high fees must do so, but no boy of great talents is excluded on account of poverty. I here is a stiff entrance examination, and the boys who pass have to undergo a brief period of probation. The pupils have no guarantee of preference after they leave, but a boy who has passed through a special scholo is sure of rapid promotion. The training, physical and mental, is obviously hard. Half the day seems to be devoted to physical exercises, the other half to intellectual training. The discipline is rigid and the training is dominated throughout by Nazi ideals, the intention clearly being that the most able young men of Germany in the future will be trained in the philosophy of National Socialism. Nazi efficiency is surely shown nowhere more clearly than in this deliberate selection and training of the lads who, by force of character and by intellectual ability, are destined to take high place in commerce, industry, the professions or politics.

Moreover, the man who designed the scheme must have been a thorough psychologist. Ile realised that a forced training in any scheme of life would provoke a reaction in after life, and the whole plan of these twelve schools is based on the. idea that the pupils must enter into the spirit of the training and enjoy it. Actually the whole scheme is a scientific application of the English public school system, narrowed down to the training not of a whole class but of a specially selected team of national leaders.