THE �LIFE BOAT� EXERCISE Education or Indoctrination?

One of the ways that Nazi psychiatrists were able to indoctrinate the population about racial hygiene and �inferior races� was through the education system, where students were a captive audience. In 1936, schoolbook texts asked students to calculate the costs of maintaining the frail and invalid, aimed at showing they were a financial burden on the country. �Problem No. 95� asked, �The construction of an insane asylum requires 6 million RM [Reichsmarks]. How many housing units @ 15,000 RM could be built for the amount spent on insane asylums?� One high school mathematics textbook asked students if 100 RMs are spent on the �mentally ill� in various institutions, what is the average cost to the state per inhabitant per year? Using the results, how much does it cost the state for patients who stay longer than 10, 20 and 25 years?

Compare this to a lesson taught in English and American schools: �A passenger liner is wrecked at sea and 15 people find themselves together in a lifeboat. The lifeboat however, can only support 9 people. If 6 are not eliminated everyone will die. If you were in command of the lifeboat, whom would you choose to survive? � You are required in groups of 2 to reach a joint decision as to which passengers will be eliminated.�

The list includes: a doctor; African American minister; a prostitute with no parents but who makes an excellent nurse; a male criminal; a mentally disturbed man; a salesman; a crippled boy paralyzed since birth; a married couple�the husband is a construction worker who drinks a lot and the wife is a housewife with two children at home; a Jewish restaurant owner married with three children at home; a teacher; a Catholic nun; an unemployed man, formerly a professor of literature and a survivor of a concentration camp; and another married Irish couple, deeply in love but with no children.

In 1999, Phyllis Schlafly, founder of the parents group Eagle Forum, wrote: �The most frequently used classroom dilemma is the �lifeboat game� (and its numerous variations, such as the fallout shelter). � The student is vested with the authority to decide who lives and who dies. Shall it be the famous author, or the pregnant woman, or the rabbi, or the Hollywood dancer, or the policeman? Any answer is acceptable-�whatever each student feels comfortable with is OK, and the students can all choose different drowning targets because there are no right or wrong answers. No wrong answers, that is, except one. One mother told our � Parents Advisory Center that her child answered the question by saying, �Jesus brought another boat and nobody had to drown.� That child got an �F� for giving an unacceptable answer.�

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