Mein Kampf
This education has to be confined to large, general considerations, which, if necessary, must be pounded into the people’s memories and feelings by perpetual repetition.
But with us, in addition to the negative sin of omission, there is positive destruction of what little the individual is lucky enough to learn at school. The rats of political infection gnaw even that little out of the hearts and memories of the great mass of our people, and privation and wretchedness have done their share beforehand.
For instance, imagine this:
In a basement dwelling of two stuffy rooms lives a laborer’s family of seven. Among the five children a boy of let us say, three. This is the age when a child first becomes conscious of impressions. Gifted people carry memories of that period far into old age.
The very smallness and overcrowding of the space produce an unfortunate situation. It is enough in itself often to produce quarrels and bickering. The people are not living with one another, they are squeezed together. Every argument, no matter how trifling, which in a roomy dwelling can be smoothed out simply by separation, here leads to an endless, disgusting quarrel. Among the children this may be tolerable; in such conditions they quarrel constantly, and forget it quickly and completely. But if the battle is fought between the parents, and this almost daily, in ways whose inward coarseness is extreme, the results of such an object lesson are bound to appear in the children, no matter how slowly. What these results must be if the dispute takes the form of father’s brutality to mother, of drunken maltreatment, a person who does not know the life can hardly imagine. By the time he is six the pitiable little boy has a notion of things which must horrify even an adult. Morally infected, physically undernourished, vermin in his poor little scalp, the young “citizen” goes to primary school. With great difficulty and to-do he gets to the point of reading and writing, and that is about all. Studying at home is out of the question. On the contrary. Father and mother talk unprintably, and that to the children, about teachers and school, and are much readier to talk roughly to
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