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Benita Blessing, Learning Democracy: Education Reform in West Germany, 1945–1965, German History, Volume 28, Issue 4, December 2010, Pages 606–608, https://doi.org/10.1093/gerhis/ghq030
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The years of student unrest and revolutions of the 1960s and 1970s in West Germany (Federal Republic of Germany, FRG), argues Brian Puaca, have eclipsed the importance of the first two decades of slow but steady educational and social reforms that determined that country's ability to survive as a sovereign, democratic state. It is a bold argument that matches a long-overdue undertaking. Not since James Tent's 1982 Mission on the Rhine: Reeducation and Denazification in American-Occupied Germany has there been a comprehensive study of the extent to which postwar American fears that Germans would never shake loose the bonds of a dictatorship were valid. Using professional educational journals, textbooks, instructional materials, pupils’ essays and student government publications, and oral history interviews with former teachers and students of the American-occupied zone, Puaca makes a compelling argument that contemporary observers and historians have overstated the problems of the FRG's tracked school system. Far from being an ossified structure that reified the undemocratic tendencies of German society, the educational system between 1945 and 1965 accepted and fostered the changes that its reformers—American and German—demanded of it and that its pupils embraced.
