Philosophy of Education of the Third Reich: origin, political and ideological contexts and conceptual constructions

Abstract

The article proposes the analysis of the development of the philosophy of education in the Third Reich, including its theoretical origin with corresponding social, cultural and political contexts. The leading role of the political romantics is showed in this process with its educational implications. This research has a wide-spread empirical background including narrative interviews with the former participants of the educational processes which are described both on the factual and interpretative level. The semantics and linguistic preferences of national-socialism used in its philosophy of education show the pedagogical intentions grounded on the race theory. The “folk view of world” in the period of the national-social movement was later changed into the philosophy of political education and folk-political anthropology (E. Krieck), where the concept folk community with its leader (Führer) is a constitutive one and the functional education has become a priority before the intentional strategies. The deformation of bourgeois human ideal through returning to the myth of origin and Nietzsche’s concept of the superman is remarkable in the new contrary ideals of “the Soldier” (A. Baeumler) and the “Worker”(E. Jünger) used in the educational practices of the national-socialism with the priority of the functional education. The identification of the “soldier way of life” as the representation of Nordic race with the pedagogical reality had consequences in the curriculum philosophy of schools and universities, where the physical education and the race theory have displaced the traditional subjects studies and their research fields, especially after their synchronic switching on the totalitarian state, which must understand itself as the educational one created for the German race. The national-socialist political pedagogic has the features of the “total mobilization” for the total war as the free decision of young men ready to die for Hitler’s Germany. Emphasizing of the self-activities, self-control, self-aid and self-education in the national-pedagogical directives is connected with the utopian dream of automatically fulfillment of all educational plans with the intention to create a new human for the new society. The new schools organized under national-socialism have showed the regress in comparison with educational institutions of the Weimar republic, where the educational system has showed more variety and flexibility as the chaotic improvisations of the educational reformers of the Third Reich with their fiction of the educational philosophy, which was only the well-known maid of the new political theology.