| This work studies the efforts of American, British, and French occupiers to control and reform the schools and universities of western Germany after World War II—the “reeducation” of German students and teachers. While the “denazification” of textbooks, curricula, and the teaching corps took up much of their time in the first year of occupation, the reeducators were equally, if not more, concerned with reforming several educational structures and traditions that predated the National Socialist regime by decades. By promoting equal educational opportunity, local administration, parental choice, student government, and curricula that stressed social sciences, civics, and modern languages, the reeducators sought to contribute to the postwar democratization of German society.; However, many German educators, administrators, politicians, church leaders, and parents clung tenaciously to traditional institutions such as the classical Gymnasium and the confessional school. Faced with fierce resistance to their ideas, the representatives of the Western democracies found themselves in the awkward position of “forcing the Germans to be free.” One of the principal objectives of this work, therefore, is to assess how the reeducators resolved the paradox of promoting democratic reform in German education while denying the Germans control over such a basic function of their society.; This dissertation also seeks to explain why the Western Allies would undertake such a problematic (and virtually unprecedented) intervention in the educational system of a fellow Great Power in the first place. To do so, reeducation must be understood in the context of both the history of European and American education in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and the history of international relations during World War II and the Cold War. In this respect, the story of reeducation serves as a prime example of what Akira Iriye has described as “international relations as intercultural relations,” taking place at the level of culture instead of high politics or grand strategy and featuring schoolteachers, professors, and clergymen instead of politicians, diplomats, and generals. |
