RE-EDUCATING EUROPE'S CHILDREN

New Zealand Listener, Volume 15, Issue 384, 1 November 1946, Page 9

RE-EDUCATING EUROPE'S CHILDREN

Many Are Suffering Now For The Sins of Their Fathers

at | HEN food is got to them the children of Europe recover their physical stamina with quite surprising speed -but their psychological recovery will take much longer. Organisationally speaking, the Occupation has left a whole host of queer and difficult educational problems." O the Director of the Commission which the Allied Ministers of Education set up at the end of the war to enquire into the situation of the children in Occupied Europe told The Listener the other day. He is Dr. J. A. Lauwerys, a naturalised Briton and a Lecturer at London University (although born and partly educated in Belgium), and is returning from the Perth Conference of the International New Education Fellowship, of which he is Deputy Chairman, Beyond this statement, however, Dr. Lauwerys would not generalise. "You

can’t speak of ‘Europe’ to-day," he explained. "It is a series of zones, not a continent. There’s first the East, which the Nazis regarded as inhabited by inferior barbarians and treated accordingly. Then there’s the Latin countries, including France, where they thought the people were racially inferior but certainly with culture, and so treated them indulgently. There’s the Germanic countries-Norway, Denmark, Holland and Belgium- where the people were treated as equals-though, of course, anti-German activities got short shift. And finally there’s conquered Italy and Germany, the latter jtself subdivided. "In the East the Nazis supplied only enough rations to sustain labour and shut up all the Universities and secondary schools. Their attitude was imperialist colonialism or slaveholding carried to its complete conclusions. Their ‘New Order’ was Huxley’s ‘Brave New World’ -which, of course, is just Plato’s utopia made feasible by sctence-put into practice: And the Slavs were regarded as ‘gammas’: naturally low-grade people fit only to. grow food, or work on assembly lines. But in the West the Nazis interfered hardly at all with the schools." Slipping Past the Barriers We were surprised, and said so. "Of course they gave orders that there was to be no teaching of any local nationalism or of any interpretation of life -like the Christian or the Marxist in-terpretations-which clashed with Nazism. But you can’t enforce even a negative instruction like that without having an inspector stationed all day long in every classroom. And clever teachers can get past anything. For example, a French teacher friend of mine was told that he ought to feature the Hundred Years War-which of course was sheer English aggression against. the French. He did. But he never once referred to the ‘invaders’ by their national name. He called them the ‘occupation forces.’ The Burgundians, who helped the English, he called ‘collaborators.’ Joan of Arc he spoke of as ‘rallying the Resistance’ and so on." Then the Western education systems could carry right on to-day as before the war, we suggested. "In the main, yes," replied Dr. Lauwerys, "as soon as destroyed school buildings have been rebuilt and undernourished children have recovered. The latter job can often be done the faster. I saw in England, for example, a football team drawn from Dutch children, who had been in a health camp there for only three months, beat the local school team, "Even the Belsen children are mostly normal weight-for-age by this time — although, mind you, only the fittest survived, and other children have been lucky if they’ve been as well fed since. But psychological upsets persist. For example, these Belsen children have queer complexes originating in their constant anxiety about food, but didn’t © acquire any of the more usual sexual inhibitions in the camp’s promiscuous conditions. Children of political interness

who were taken after peace to Swiss health camps subconsciously considered themselves still prisoners and had wild animosities and suspicions against their well-inten-tioned rescuers. The thought of escape to Palestine has become so absorbing to thousands of young Jews who have never known security, that it, too, amounts to an obsession with many. Or another illustration-when the World Student Christian Federation meeting in Switzerland last month elected a German vice-chairman, some delegates felt that they would never be able to explain it to their national movements. And my own organisation, meeting in Paris, refused seats to Germans on the Executive. Europe, in short, is still seething with war-created animosities and irrationalities." The Children of Collaborators Then the children of collaborators would be suffering for the sins of their parents, we suggested.

"Suffering very badly, some- ~~ — times. In Holland, for example, ten per cent. of the population belong to the Dutch Fascist party. Some, of course, had joined to make living and money making easier. But many were Fascists quite sincerely for ideological reasons, as their fifth-column help to the Germans when they first attacked clearly shows. These people were armed when the Germaris surrendered and took to roofs and strongpoints where for three whole days they kept all Holland in chaos while they defied capture. The less desperate ones were finally rounded up, and more than 100,000 are still in concentration camps-or were six months ago. Conditions for their children have often been crude. In one over-crowded sick-bay which I saw, a boy with whoopingcough shared the same bed as one with measles. "In Norway the Germans left 10,000 illegitimate children. (The Nazi authorities flatly prohibited all intercourse with Slavs, behaved punctiliously to French women, but actually encouraged liaisons with Scandinavians.) Well, the Norwegians took the children from their mothers for a mixture of moral and patriotic reasons, but were absolutely stumped about what to do with them until the Swedes very decently offered to find homes for the lot. All children in Norway go to school up to 14. But after that headmasters must decide, on the merits of each case, whether or not to let collaborators’ children go further." That reminded us of other groups stranded among communities ideologically antagonistic to them-Roman Catholics in the new Orthodox and communist Yugoslavia, for example, or the 80,000 Cossacks who had fought for Hitler in Italy. We asked how their children were faring. In replying, Dr. Lauwerys concentrated on one such situation with which he was familiar.

In tt ee Le ene oy Pe 66s "Eupen-Malmedy," he said, "is a mainly German district that wes somewhat unfortunately added to Belgium after the last war. After the Germans marched through on the tenth of May, 1940, the schools closed for the weekend and opened with totally new equipment, staff, and methods-all first-class educationally. And from then to the war’s end they concentrated on making the Eupen-Malmedy children expert saboteurs-to guard the Siegfried Line -and enthusiastic Nazis. One history book I saw was called Robberstate England and was pure inverted Vansittartism — Vansittart turned inside out — showing, for example, starved-looking Indians being hanged or over-worked and the map getting steadily redder. Well, what can Belgium do to re-edu-cate these young people who enjoyed life under Nazism so intensely?" That led to a discussion on how to re-educate the Germans’ themselves. "Italy’s new education system is the most democratic in the world," declared Dr. Lauwerys. "But I fear we are starting at the wrong end in Germany. The lower-class textbooks were never much altered by the Nazis. It was higher education that they prostituted to propaganda. Yet to-day we have the lower schools running only half-time, but we _have reopened some _ universities-just the place for Nazi ex-officers to gather: in fact a democratic professor has already been shouted down at Freiburg. I believe we ought to be very easy on infected individuals: but utterly ruthless with infected institutions. "Besides-re-education by one nation, or for one nation, has limits. That is why I am very glad to be a liaison officer with UNESCO, the United Nations’ Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation."