Forced Government Schooling

This is the second post in a series examining the origins of our government-controlled school system.  The first can be found here: In the beginning: mostly voluntary and private.   

Perhaps one of the most concise descriptions of how the 19^th Century
Prussian schooling system became a model for American schools can be found in the Wikipedia entry Emulation of the Prussian education system in the United States :

American educators were fascinated by German educational trends. In 1818, John Griscom gave a favorable report of Prussian education. English translations were made of French philosopher Victor Cousin’s work, “Report on the State of Public Education in Prussia.” Calvin E. Stowe, Henry Barnard, Horace Mann, George Bancroft and Joseph Cogswell all had a vigorous interest in German education. In 1843, Mann traveled to Germany to investigate how the educational process worked. Upon his return to the United States, he lobbied heavily to have the “Prussian model” adopted.

Mann convinced his fellow modernizers, especially those in the Whig Party to legislate tax-supported elementary public education in their states. Indeed, most northern states adopted one version or another of the system he established in Massachusetts, especially the program for “normal schools” to train professional teachers. In 1852, Mann was instrumental in the decision to adopt the Prussian education system in Massachusetts. Soon New York state set up the same method in 12 different schools on a trial basis.

That system was characterized by compulsory attendance, teacher colleges, standardized national tests, national age-graded curriculum, compulsory kindergarten, the fragmenting of concepts into separate subjects with fixed periods of study, and the state ultimately asserting a superior claim to the child over the rights of the parents. This was a radical departure in methodology and content from the successful traditional forms of education in America.

Educator John Taylor Gatto in The Underground History of American Education  describes Prussian thinking at the time:

The Prussian mind, which carried the day, held a clear idea of what centralized schooling should deliver: 1) Obedient soldiers to the army; 2) Obedient workers for mines, factories, and farms; 3) Well-subordinated civil servants, trained in their function; 4) Well-subordinated clerks for industry; 5) Citizens who thought alike on most issues; 6) National uniformity in thought, word, and deed.

The area of individual volition for commoners was severely foreclosed by Prussian psychological training procedures drawn from the experience of animal husbandry and equestrian training, and also taken from past military experience.

In The Prussian Elementary Schools, Thomas Alexander, Professor of Elementary Education at the George Peabody College for Teachers wrote the following in 1919:

We believe however that a careful study of the Prussian school system will convince any unbiased reader that the Prussian citizen cannot be free to do and act for himself; that the Prussian is to a large measure enslaved through the medium of his school that his learning instead of making him his own master forges the chain by which he is held in servitude; that the whole scheme of Prussian elementary education is shaped with the express purpose of making ninety five out of every hundred citizens subservient to the ruling house and to the state.

Alexander’s book clearly documented  the totalitarian nature  of the Prussian model but, foreshadowing the intellectual myopia of today’s education establishment, he did not appear to see that an Americanized government-controlled education system would be only marginally better and would clearly contradict our founding principles.  

For some additional background on the Prussian system, see The Prussian-Industrial History of Public Schooling published by The New American Academy.

Given the top-down (i.e. forced)  introduction of a system that was so clearly antithetical to American values, one would expect some resistance.  Stay tuned for the next post to see how the system was imposed on an often unwilling populace.