Not just women, young people, students, and school pupils, but also many other sectors of German society were catered for by specially designed Nazi … - Richard J. Evans

Hitler insisted that political education was a matter for the Party and not for state-run institutions or state-appointed teachers… All the staff had to undergo regular special training, and the students also had to spend time several weeks a year working on a farm or a factory to maintain contacts with the people.

For all their deficiencies, the Hitler Youth movement and the increasingly Nazified school system were driving a wedge between parents who still retained some loyalty to the beliefs and standards they had grown up in themselves, and their children who were being indoctrinated at every stage of their lives. As one such agent ruefully observed: ‘It is extremely difficult for parents who are opponents of the Nazis to exercise an influence on their children. Either they ask the child not to talk at school about what is said at home. Then the children get the feeling, aha, the parents have to hide what they think. The teacher permits himself to say everything out loud. So he’s bound to be right. - Or the parents express their opinion without giving the child a warning. Then it’s not long before they are arrested or at the very least called up before the teacher, who shouts at them and threatens to report them. - ‘Send your father to the school!’ That is the normal answer to suspicious doubts and questions on the part of the child. If the father is quiet after such a visit, then he gives the child the impression that he has been convinced by what the teacher has told him, and the effect is far worse than if nothing had ever been said.’

At every level, formal learning was given decreased emphasis… By 1939 employers were complaining that school graduates’ standards of knowledge of language and arithmetic were poor and that ‘the level of school knowledge of the examinees had been sinking for some time.’ Yet this did not cause any concern to the regime. As Hans Schemm, the leader of the Nazi Teachers’ League up to 1935, declared: ‘The goal of our education is the formation of character’, and he complained that too much knowledge had been crammed into children, to the detriment of character-building.