The Rise of the Fourth Reich - ThereAreNoSunglasses

EDUCATION 317those destined to be their employees,” explained Elizabeth Weiss Greenwriting in U.S. News & World Report.But even in the 1800s, thoughtful persons questioned the propriety ofbusiness guiding education. “Education would then become an instrumentof perpetuating unchanged the existing industrial order of society.Who, then, shall conduct education so that humanity may improve?”questioned John Dewey, the American philos opher, psychologist, and educationreformer.In mid-2007, billionaires Bill Gates and Eli Broad announced they hadpooled $60 million to finance a campaign to emphasize education in the2008 elections. However, the pair’s ideas for improving American educationwere immediately criticized, because the three tenets of their campaignwere: making teachers’ salary increases dependent on student testscores, keeping students in class with more days and longer hours, and settingfederal curriculum standards based on input from corporate leaders.NAT IONA L SOCI A L I SM I N the Germany of the 1930s made a strong appealto its youth. The Nazis fully realized that if the younger generationscould be brought to their worldview, the future of National Socialismwould be assured. “Fascism in all countries made a fetish of youthfulness,”commented George L. Mosse, author of Nazi Culture. “What acontrast this offered to the elderly politicians haggling in parliaments,or to the fossilized bureaucracies which ran the nations (and the politicalparties) of Europe.”Modern America also has witnessed conflict between the younger andolder generations. The genesis of this generational conflict began with therock- and-roll music of the 1950s and grew full-blown with the VietnamWar, when families were split along lines of age. The young embraced theantiwar movement while the older generations, tempered by the propagandaof World War II, supported the war policies of Lyndon Johnsonand Richard Nixon.Here again was a reflection of Nazi Germany, where Hitler’s promisesof a more prosperous future held considerable sway with the younger