EUROPEAN POLICIES OF FINANCING PUBLIC EDUCATIONAL INSTITUTIONS. IV. GERMANY

by Fletcher Harper Swift '98. University ofCalifornia Press, p. 348.

It was some years ago that Dr. Swift first startled America with his disclosure of the amazing inequalities in educational opportunities existing in this country on account of differences in the school budgets of the various sections.

Of late years he has been engaged in a painstaking and scholarly investigation into the financing of European school systems. Volumes on Czechoslovakia, Austria and France have preceded this new publication. A work on England is to follow.

This work which we are reviewing is not intended for the layman or the public in general. The average person would perhaps confuse the SchulaufsichtsbehÖrde with the Umzugskostenvergiitungen. The 183 tables, loaded with statistics and other data, would discourage the casual reader.

Nevertheless there are facts contained in them which all Americans would do well to know.

We can better understand how an excorporal and ex-paper hanger can lead the German people around by the nose when we read in Dr. Swift's book how few Germans ever enter the secondary schools.

He also tells us how every healthy German child of school age must attend a public Volksschule. Hitler is going to have no private schools competing with him for the child's loyalty, and no private institutions, with superior equipment and exceptional teachers, giving one set of privileged children any better instruction than that which the state provides for the poorest boy or girl in the realm. It is only after finishing the elementary school that the children of the wealthier class may pay tuition and attend schools better equipped than their less fortunate comrades have.

Dr. Swift tells that the Reich has had a hard time financing its educational program. Cannon and air-planes must take precedence over schools, and he states that since 1931 many buildings have been closed and many teachers dropped from the payroll, while the survivors have all suffered salary cuts. However, at present, although there still may be salary reductions, there are no more wholesale dismissal of teachers. Says Dr. Swift: "the system".... "gives to teachers a degree of social, professional and economic security totally unknown in the United States." He says that conditions like those in Chicago a few years ago, where the entire teaching force worked for over a year without a cent of pay, or like those in North Little Rock, Arkansas, where in 1920 this city of 15,000 inhabitants "did not maintain a free public school one day in the year," could never arise in Germany.

Dr. Swift mentions a German policy of which the president of a great American University would thoroughly approve.

Some of our readers may recall that in 1936 Dr. Conant of Harvard proposed that public funds should be available to enable gifted children from our poorer homes to continue their education through college. He pointed out that there would be a great advance in the intellectual tone of the average American college if some of our present students, who are in attendance only from inertia or because their parents will it, should be replaced by this other group, eager to learn and so keenly appreciative of the opportunity granted them by state subsidy that they, in turn, will be eager to repay, in service, the debt that they feel they owe to society.

Poor as Germany is, says Dr. Swift, and cramped though the educational budget may be, the Reich is looking ahead. Over 15,000 exceptional young people, who from poverty would never have gone beyond the Volksschule, are being assisted, through state funds, to render themselves, by higher training, more useful to the Reich which educates them.

There is plenty of food for thought, as well as valuable and no doubt very reliable statistical matter, to be found in this scholarly work.