The Nazis destroyed the German educational system through an overemphasis on PE and the Hitler Youth. By 1942, 50% of medical students failed their exams, science students 'could no longer solve equations, use logarithm tables, or compute fractions'.

'The cause of these problems, according to one university comment, was that students had seemingly lost their ability to concentrate or to take the time to reason out problems. They did not possess the capacity to sit still. This had resulted in a drastic decline in attendance..'

'At lectures, concerts and library reading rooms. As a consequence, their failure rate on examinations was staggering. In medicine it hovered near forty to fifty percent. Even those students who passed, however, had done so poorly that they had to be regarded as..'

'"professionally unprepared." The strongest evidence supporting these effects of the educational rebellion in the higher schools and the policies of the Nazi regime in general was a 1942 SD statement that "numerous foreign students"

'already manifest an advantage in the quality of their achievement over German students." At Strassburg, French students had shown themselves to be better prepared than Germans, while Yugoslavs enrolled at Graz were also better trained than the graduates of German schools!'

'[in Liegnitz] only 20 out of 90 new apprentices managed to pass their entrance examinations while Bayreuth recorded a failure rate as high as 98%. The universities... were shocked at the level of preparation of their incoming students. "decent academic work hardly conceivable."

The Nazi attitude towards traditional teaching was anti-intellectual, disdaining book-learning in favour of physical education and sports, combined with a campaign against the authority of schools and teachers. This had long-term consequences.

Schools were full of tired students who had been camping, or marching in the HJ and were too tired to do schoolwork. The HJ started a generational conflict by attacking teachers as elderly pedants.

Worth reading the full article, eye-opening stuff.

"One instructor, [discovered] that his students considered Leonardo da Vinci to be an Italian movie star"