Last Monday's Daily Mail contained an instructive article describing how
the teachers of Verdun "cheated the Germans." One of the teachers told the story. On orders from Vichy, he said, all the old text-books were scrapped, and new ones, which must have alarmed every good French teacher in the country, supplied by Vichy ; the teachers were told to teach on German lines. "But," he continued, " we teachers became the screen between the new scheme and the children. We taught them from our minds and our blackboards, ignoring the Vichy text-books. We cheated the Germans there." I quote this not for its intrinsic interest, though that is not small, but because of the striking confirmation it provides of misgivings many people have entertained about the re- education of Germany. The Nazi text-books must, of course, be scrapped ; no one doubts that ; the new ones to replace them must be approved by some Allied Commission. But any German teacher with Nazi sympathies can as easily side-track the new text-books as the French teachers did the Vichy ones. What is essential is the right kind of teacher—and that will be a great deal more difficult to supply in post-war Germany than the right kind of text-book.
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