Horace Mann, the first Superintendent of Schools in America, loved order above all, and as he had been frustrated in trying to standardize Massachusetts schools, he saw the already completed Prussian model as a shortcut to his goal. His success in adopting Prussian-style schools changed the course not only of American education, but of American history, as well.
For Mann imported a cynical system created by elite Prussian industrialists in order to produce a fascist state with an ideology that promoted:
* Dictatorial government.
* A centralized control of the national economy, political decisions, military life and operations, and education.
* Stiff and violent repression of any opposition or any variance in ideas.
* Censorship of artistic expression.
* Record keeping and regular surveillance of its citizens.
* Unquestioned nationalism.
Prussia’s highest virtue was absolute obedience to authority. For the small group of industrialists, the goal was generating the highest profits possible in a state that sponsored an invincible army. There were, in short, no individual rights or liberties, except for the elite. All power was held by the state, controlled by the industrialists.
Yet even Prussia’s educational system, which Mann investigated, had two faces.. For the elite, the Realschule was to be the place where true education would take place. Here students would freely interact, discuss topics, debate and, in general, learn to think. Here they would gain leadership skills and become identified with the elite class. Here they would dabble in classical education.
Horace Mann, however, rejected this system of education in favor of the one that specialized in creating human robots for factories and the military.
According to John Gatto’s highly documented Underground History of American Education, 92% of Prussia’s children were forced to attend the school that prepared students for one of two occupations: obedient soldiers in the army, or obedient workers in the factories.
This school for commoners was the Volksschule. It was this model school that Horace Mann chose to adopt and transplant to Massachusetts, the model that was to be eventually adopted by every state in the United States, and then by our federal government, and which has become in everything but name our federal system of compulsory, national education. Everything in this school was designed to break the spirit of individuals and train them to become bored, undifferentiated sheep-workers, willing to relinquish personal dreams for the glory of the state.
Prussia, as the first military-industrial-educational complex to inaugurate the Industrial Revolution, appealed to industrialists in America and throughout the world. Because Prussia represented the triumph of fascist planning and practice, it inspired the would-be fascist industrialists everywhere, as did Hitler’s absolutist beliefs and propaganda in a later age. It maximized and guaranteed obscene profits for the already wealthy. It created an army of compliant, submissive workers for industry and created a military force capable of defeating Napoleon at Waterloo, and exacting revenge on France for humiliating Prussia in the battle of Jena in 1806. It proved to the satisfaction of many that “might makes right,” that to the brutal victor come all the spoils.
As Gatto explains:
“The particular utopia American believers chose to bring to the schoolhouse was Prussian. The seed that became American schooling, twentieth-century style, was planted in 1806 when Napoleon’s amateur soldiers bested the professional soldiers of Prussia at the battle of Jena. When your business is renting soldiers and employing diplomatic extortion under threat of your soldiery, losing a battle like that is pretty serious. Something had to be done.
“The most important immediate reaction to Jena was an immortal speech, the ‘Address to the German Nation” by the philosopher Fichte—one of the influential documents of modern history leading directly to the first workable compulsion schools in the West. Other times, other lands talked about schooling, but all failed to deliver. Simple forced training for brief intervals and for narrow purposes was the best that had ever been managed. This time it would be different.
“In no uncertain terms Fichte told Prussia the party was over. Children would have to be disciplined through a new form of universal conditioning. They could no long be trusted to their parents. Look what Napoleon had done by banishing sentiment in the interests of nationalism. Through forced schooling, everyone would learn that ‘work makes free,’ and working for the State, even laying down one’s life to its commands, was the greatest freedom of all. Here in the genius of semantic redefinition lay the power to cloud men’s minds, a power later packaged and sold by public relations pioneers Edward Bernays and Ivy Lee in the seedtime of American forced schooling.
Prior to Fichte’s challenge any number of compulsion-school proclamations had rolled off printing presses here and there, including Martin Luther’s plan to tie church and state together this way and, of course, the ‘Old Deluder Satan’ law of 1642 in Massachusetts and its 1645 extension. The problem was these earlier ventures were virtually unenforceable, roundly ignored by those who smelled mischief lurking behind fancy promises of free education. People who wanted their kids schooled had them schooled even then; people who didn’t didn’t. That was more or less true for most of us right into the twentieth century; only 32 percent of American kids went past elementary school as late as 1920. If that sounds impossible, consider the practice in Switzerland today where only 23 percent of the student population goes to high school though Switzerland has the world’s highest per capita income in the world.
“Prussia was prepared to use bayonets on its own people as readily as it wielded them against others, so it’s not all that surprising the human race got its first effective secular compulsion schooling out of Prussia in 1819, the same year Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, set in the darkness of far off Germany, was published in England. Schule came after more than a decade of deliberations, commissions, testimony, and debate. For a brief, hopeful moment, Humboldt’s brilliant arguments for a high-level no-holds-barred, free-swinging, universal, intellectual course of study for all, full of variety, free debate, rich experience, and personalized curricula almost won the day. What a different world we would have today if Humboldt had won the Prussian debate, but the forces backing Baron vom Stein won instead. And that has made all the difference."
John Taylor Gatto
The Underground History of American Education, P.131-132
In the 1840s, the totalitarian state of Prussia adopted many strategies reminiscent of first state educational system of the ancient military camp of Sparta. Those strategies, which clearly reveal the mindset of its proponents, included:
1 Compulsory attendance
2. Regimentation and uniformity and standardization in all aspects of the school day
3. Worship of efficiency and mechanization
4. Centralized control of all schools
5. Planned limited intellectual development
6. Socially Engineered Obedience and Subordination (managing the thought life of children through the new Scientific Psychology of Mind Control and Conditioned Learning)
7. Science at the center of the curriculum
8. Universal Standards for all children
9. State controlled Teacher Certification
10. Segregating children in classrooms by Age
11. Universal Child Labor Laws preventing children from working prescribed for all others.
12. Indoctrination with a rigid, planned curriculum for all grades
13. Forbidding the use of phonics in learning to read
14. Use of Controlled Vocabulary to regulate what students could read and could not read
15. Reliance on State Sponsored Textbooks (information was homogenized, altered, made politically correct, passionless anddull)
16. Social studies (with pointed lessons on how to be an ideal citizen) replaced any knowledge of history and the historical process
17. The use of the bogus science of Phrenology (bumps on the head represent developed and undeveloped regions of the brain) to manage student behavior
18. The state assumed legal guardianship of each child
Prussian schools thus foreshadowed the employment of compulsory schooling for national indoctrination in the United States, in Great Britain, in Soviet Russia, in Fascist Italy, in Nazi Germany, and Imperial Japan.
Prussia, it is clear, was a state where absolute control could not even be questioned. This repressive regime totally managed the life of its citizens. The surveillance of the state reached into every aspect of life.
In this way, the system would guarantee education of the state, by the state, and for the state. The child became the moldable property of the state, to be used solely for its purposes.
All 18 of these strategies of fascist Prussia were seized on by Horace Mann and made part of the Massachusetts public schools; most were in place within a decade. There were many in Massachusetts, probably the majority, that could not reconcile individual liberty with compulsory, state-sponsored education, and who strongly resented and resisted turning their children over to the state.
But Mann was a powerful individual with a network of strong political connections gained by his years as a Massachusetts representative and senator. He was known for being a persuasive orator, a successful lawyer, for his office as President of the Massachusetts’ Senate, for his aggressive establishment of educational reforms and forceful attempts to standardize and regulate schools as secretary of the Massachusetts Board of Education, and for creating a well-regulated Massachusetts lunatic asylum in Worcester. Everyone who owed him a favor was enlisted to vote or persuaded others to vote for his compulsory school bill. The law passed in Massachusetts in 1852. The Prussian model of education had been successfully transplanted to America. From that point on, America was destined to be controlled by the industrial magnates.
Mann was able to introduce an officially non-sectarian education that, in fact, was based on good Protestant principles that would protect the state from the huge influx of Catholics from Ireland.
Over the next 70 years, battles between proponents of a free educational system (mostly parents) and those who advocated the uniformity that could only be accomplished through compulsory education, a la Prussia, would be waged in every other state as well. The combination of political power and the interests of corporations eventually overcame the unorganized opposition of parents, although 16 states resisted and opposed the process until early in the 20th century.
After their capitulation, individual states used their discretion on how strictly to compel their students to accept the formula based on authoritarian absolutism.
For me, as a student in the compulsory education system (grades K–12), as a teacher working for the paternalistic Bureau of Indian Affairs’ government schools in Inuit (Eskimo) communities in Alaska (I had to leave because the politics of the bureau tore my heart out), as a teacher in a typical private school (I rebelled at the lack of individual expression and the extreme control exercised on the student body), and as the founder of The Well School, compulsory education was repulsive. We refuted the fascistic model and the thinking that inevitably supports it and created, instead, an education devoted to the development of individual consciousness, individual expression, and the knowledge that comes from honoring individual experience.
The irony is that the great majority of teachers working in our national, compulsory, education system are well-meaning individuals, many deeply committed to the welfare of their students, as well as to the obligatory requirements of their job. This irony is compounded by another: the vast, American public is almost totally ignorant that our “public schools” are based on the principles developed by Prussian industrialists `with a lust for absolute power and absolute control over the minds of others. The System
the Prussians devised is a system intended only for exploitation in the service of violence towards others. It works to rob us of genius, of independence and self-reliance, of self-respect, and of an awareness of living creatures.
Americans have, like the Germans and the English (who also copied Prussian educational innovations), interwoven into our national psyche an unconscious adoration of power, regardless of whether we, as individuals, play the part of the wolves or the sheep in our economic drama of survival. We are unconsciously addicted to violence, to brutal competition, to cruelty, to torture, and to indifference.
Today, violence is the mindset of kids, who play at killing day after day in video games. It is the mindset of the movie and television industry, which finds that random, indiscriminate violence creates, for them, excessive profits. It is the mindset of educational bureaucrats who, for a little power over parents and children, sell their soul to the system.
There are other ironies that should be noted. The colonists fought a bitter war to free themselves from the bureaucratic control of the English and English corporations operating in America. Yet, ultimately, every state in this “free” nation voted for bureaucratic control of their children. And now, our federal government, through the Department of Education, directs what we call “voluntary” (there is nothing voluntary about it, for federal monies to state educational agencies can be cut off in an instant), national goals and standards (strict conformity always appealed to fascistic thinking), which every child must accept as the law of the land. We have centralized education, and put children not under the control of their parents or the tutor chosen by their parents, but under the control of a federalized, two-tiered bureaucracy, in which states now bend to the will of a national imperative to create dumbed-down, obedient conformists. Often, the parents’ only recourse is to remove their children from government schools and seek the right of home education under the rules and regulations of their state.
We see that children in America are now owned by the state, as they were in Prussia. They do not only live under the laws of a government that protects their independence and freedom, but according to the multitude of exacting prescriptions of educational bureaucrats, politicians, and educational “experts” who care nothing about raising consciousness.
Is it not odd that Americans see a compulsory, national educational system, still based rigidly on the Prussian model of absolute, fascistic control, a necessity for Democracy? What pretense! What hypocrisy! For over 150 years, Americans had lived with total freedom of educational choices and maintained a level of literacy that cannot be approached today, with all ourmandated, up-to-date, scientific research and instruction by a host of fully certified teachers.
Students who attended the hundreds of common schools in early America were already literate before they left the protection of home to enter the variety of schools of their day. They did not require 12 years to learn to read intelligently or to fail to do so. With no accredited teachers (just mom and pop, or a private, uncertified tutor), one or two years was more than enough to read and understand what most college freshmen cannot read today with 12 long years of compulsory schooling: the Bible, Shakespeare, Milton, Plutarch, etc.
In this country, most of us have been subjected to compulsory schooling; public schooling (12–13 years in length) functions today as an extended right of passage. Despite its failure to create enthusiastic, curious, creative students, its graduates continue to act as apologists and defendants for U.S. forced schooling. For many of us, the public school system has had much to do with the way we were formed
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