THE GERMAN SCHOOL PROBLEM
Sts,—May I draw your attention to one of the most urgent problems in Germany ? I do not intend to discuss our food situation, though it is as bad as possible. Nor will I speak about other shortages, though it is for instance terrible for a mother that she can only once a week wash her children with soap. I wish, as one highly interested in all pro- blems of education and as the mother of six children aged 2 to 12, to direct your interest to another more dangerous problem: the present state of education. We live in one of the happier towns in N.W. Germany ; the town as a whole is not destroyed, only sane streets are bombed out. But many evacuated families from the eastern provinces are now living here so that there are nearly twice as many inhabitants as before the war. The houses are overcrowded ; so are the schools. Four of my children are of school-age and go to a preparatory school, the headmaster and staff of which know their responsibility.
In our schools there are now on the average 50 to 65 children in each class. Teachers get no extra rations, which means that they not only get a very small amount of meat and bread but, at the moment, no fat at all. The consequence is that the teachers, like everybody else, are nervous and forgetful. They have to give lessons from 8 a.m. till 4 or even 6 p.m., standing in overcrowded classrooms before tired, undernourished children. Owing to the coal shortage schools get such a small amount of coal that in a school of 24 classes containing 1,400 children, only six rooms can be heated. To overcome this a plan has been worked out by which each day four classes have their lessons in one room. But this means that the times at which the children go to school are always changing ; some days it is 8 o'clock, others 11 o'clock or in the afternoon, or still worse they may have some lessons in the morning and some in the afternoon. Other schools give lessons only twice or three times a week.
Thanks to the efforts of their teachers our children now have lessons but they have almost no schoolbooks. You are lucky if you manage to buy a pencil or a pen. If you want to buy an exercise-book—if there are any—you must giye up a certain amount of Altpapier (e.g. old news- papers) to the shopkeeper, though newspapers are very short in Germany.
These examples may help to show you the present state of education, but they are only a part of our difficulties. Owing to the present circum- stances, children are no longer accustomed to regular work. Several weeks of school life without any interruption are now considered an exception, not the rule. Supervising the children's ordinary work and teaching them responsibility is therefore mainly the mothers' task. But mothers are already overburdened by their terribly increased household duties, or have to work in a factory to earn a living for the family. If the children are not looked after they begin idling about in the streets and are soon interested spectators of the black market, where they quickly learn that you earn your money more easily there than by doing a decent job. That is our great problem: how to enable the children still as school to play their part—which is bound to be a big part—in building a new and, if possible, a better Europe. As things are at present they have neither the moral nor intellectual facilities necessary for this task.
—Yours, &c., KARLA NIERE. Celle near Hannover, Wehlstr. 3 A., British Zone.
Previous page
