What can we say about the education system in 1914?

Most of the young soldiers had not completed their education, and many still wished to do so.

"--little Albert Kropp, the clearest thinker among us and therefore only a lance-corporal; Müller, who still carries his school textbooks with him, dreams of examinations, and during a bombardment mutters propositions in physics;"

In addition, school aged boys were encouraged (and humiliated) by their teachers to leave school and join the army.

During drill-time Kantorek gave us long lectures until the whole of our class went, under his shepherding, to the District Commandant and volunteered. I can see him now, as he used to glare at us through his spectacles and say in a moving voice: "Won't you join up, Comrades?"

According to the narrator, the boys learned more during ten weeks of boot camp (life lessons) than they did in all of their years at school.

We were trained in the army for ten weeks and in this time more profoundly influenced than by ten years at school. We learned that a bright button is weightier than four volumes of Schopenhauer. At first astonished, then embittered, and finally indifferent, we recognised that what matters is not the mind but the boot brush, not intelligence but the system, not freedom but drill.