89. The Long Reach Of The Teutonic Knights: The Underground History of American Education by John Taylor Gatto from archive.org

The Long Reach Of The Teutonic Knights 

In 1876, before setting off from America to Germany to study, William H. Welch, an 
ambitious young Bostonian, told his sister: "If by absorbing German lore I can get a little 
start of a few thousand rivals and thereby reduce my competition to a few hundred more 
or less it is a good point to tally." Welch did go off to Germany for the coveted Ph.D., a 
degree which at the time had its actual existence in any practical sense only there, and in 
due course his ambition was satisfied. Welch became first dean of Johns Hopkins 
Medical School and, later, chief advisor to the Rockefeller Foundation on medical 
projects. Welch was one of thousands who found the German Ph.D. a blessing without 
parallel in late-nineteenth-century America. German Ph.D.'s ruled the academic scene by 
then. 

Prussia itself was a curious place, not an ordinary country unless you consider ordinary a 
land which by 1776 required women to register each onset of their monthly menses with 
the police. North America had been interested in Prussian developments since long 
before the American Revolution, its social controls being a favorite subject of discussion 
among Ben Franklin's 1 exclusive private discussion group, the Junta. When the phony 
Prussian baron Von Steuben directed bayonet drills for the colonial army, interest rose 
even higher. Prussia was a place to watch, an experimental state totally synthetic like our 
own, having been assembled out of lands conquered in the last crusade. For a full century 
Prussia acted as our mirror, showing elite America what we might become with 
discipline. 

In 1839, thirteen years before the first successful school compulsion law was passed in 
the United States, a perpetual critic of Boston Whig (Mann's own party) leadership 
charged that pro-posals to erect German-style teacher seminaries in this country were a 
thinly disguised attack on local and popular autonomy. The critic Brownson 2 allowed that 
state regulation of teaching licenses was a necessary preliminary only if school were 
intended to serve as a psychological control mechanism for the state and as a screen for a 
controlled economy. If that was the game truly afoot, said Brownson, it should be 
reckoned an act of treason. 



"Where the whole tendency of education is to create obedience," Brownson said, "all 
teachers must be pliant tools of government. Such a system of education is not 
inconsistent with the theory of Prussian society but the thing is wholly inadmissible 
here." He further argued that "according to our theory the people are wiser than the 
government. Here the people do not look to the government for light, for instruction, but 
the government looks to the people. The people give law to the government." He 
concluded that "to entrust government with the power of determining education which 
our children shall receive is entrusting our servant with the power of the master. The 
fundamental difference between the United States and Prussia has been overlooked by the 
board of education and its supporters." 3 

This same notion of German influence on American institutions occurred recently to a 
historian from Georgetown, Dr. Carroll Quigley. Quigley's analysis of elements in 
German character which were exported to us occurs in his book Tragedy and Hope: A 
History of the World in Our Time. Quigley traced what he called "the German thirst for 
the coziness of a totalitarian way of life" to the breakup of German tribes in the great 
migrations fifteen hundred years ago. When pagan Germany finally transferred its loyalty 
to the even better totalitarian system of Diocletian in post-Constantine Rome, that system 
was soon shattered, too, a second tragic loss of security for the Germans. According to 
Quigley, they refused to accept this loss. For the next one thousand years, Germans made 
every effort to reconstruct the universal system, from Charlemagne's Holy Roman 
Empire right up to the aftermath of Jena in 1806. During that thousand-year interval, 
other nations of the West developed individual liberty as the ultimate center of society 
and its principal philosophical reality. But while Germany was dragged along in the same 
process, it was never convinced that individual sovereignty was the right way to organize 
society. 

Germans, said Quigley, wanted freedom from the need to make decisions, the negative 
freedom that comes from a universal totalitarian structure which gives security and 
meaning to life. The German is most at home in military, ecclesiastical, or educational 
organizations, ill at ease with equality, democracy, individualism, or freedom. This was 
the spirit that gave the West forced schooling in the early nineteenth century, so spare a 
little patience while I tell you about Prussia and Prussianized Germany whose original 
mission was expressly religious but in time became something else. 

During the thirteenth century, the Order of Teutonic Knights set about creating a new 
state of their own. After fifty turbulent years of combat, the Order successfully 
Christianized Prussia by the efficient method of exterminating the entire native 
population and replacing it with Germans. By 1281, the Order's hold on lands once 
owned by the heathen Slavs was secure. Then something of vital importance to the future 
occurred — the system of administration selected to be set up over these territories was not 
one patterned on the customary European model of dispersed authority, but instead was 
built on the logic of Saracen centralized administration, an Asiatic form first described by 
crusaders returned from the Holy Land. For an example of these modes of administration 
in conflict, we have Herodotus' account of the Persian attempt to force the pass at 
Thermopylae — Persia with its huge bureaucratically subordinated army arrayed against 



self-directed Leonidas and his three hundred Spartans. This romantic image of personal 
initiative, however misleading, in conflict with a highly trained and specialized military 
bureaucracy, was passed down to sixty generations of citizens in Western lands as an 
inspiration and model. Now Prussia had established an Asiatic beachhead on the northern 
fringe of Europe, one guided by a different inspiration. 

Between the thirteenth and nineteenth centuries, the Order of Teutonic Knights evolved 
by gradual stages into a highly efficient, secular civil service. In 1525, Albert of 
Brandenberg declared Prussia a secular kingdom. By the eighteenth century, under 
Frederick the Great, Prussia had become a major European power in spite of its striking 
material disadvantages. From 1740 onwards, it was feared throughout Europe for its 
large, well-equipped, and deadly standing army, comprising a formulaic 1 percent of the 
population. After centuries of debate, the 1 percent formula became the lot of the United 
States military, too, a gift of Prussian strategist von Clausewitz to America. By 1740, the 
mature Prussian state-structure was almost complete. During the reigns of Frederick I and 
his son Frederick II, Frederick the Great, the modern absolute state was fashioned there 
by means of immense sacrifices imposed on the citizenry to sustain permanent 
mobilization. 

The historian Thomas Macauley wrote of Prussia during these years: "The King carried 
on warfare as no European power ever had, he governed his own kingdom as he would 
govern a besieged town, not caring to what extent private property was destroyed or civil 
life suspended. The coin was debased, civil functionaries unpaid, but as long as means for 
destroying life remained, Frederick was determined to fight to the last." Goethe said 
Frederick "saw Prussia as a concept, the root cause of a process of abstraction consisting 
of norms, attitudes and characteristics which acquired a life of their own. It was a unique 
process, supra-individual, an attitude depersonalized, motivated only by the individual's 
duty to the State." Today it's easy for us to recognize Frederick as a systems theorist of 
genius, one with a real country to practice upon. 

Under Frederick William II, Frederick the Great's nephew and successor, from the end of 
the eighteenth century on into the nineteenth, Prussian citizens were deprived of all rights 
and privileges. Every existence was comprehensively subordinated to the purposes of the 
State, and in exchange the State agreed to act as a good father, giving food, work, and 
wages suited to the people's capacity, welfare for the poor and elderly, and universal 
schooling for children. The early nineteenth century saw Prussian state socialism arrive 
full-blown as the most dynamic force in world affairs, a powerful rival to industrial 
capitalism, with antagonisms sensed but not yet clearly identified. It was the moment of 
schooling, never to surrender its grip on the throat of society once achieved. 



Franklin's great-grandson, Alexander Dallas Bache became the leading American proponent of Prussianism in 1839. After a European school 
inspection tour lasting several years, his Report on Education in Europe, promoted heavily by Quakers, devoted hundreds of pages to glowing 
description of Pestalozzian method and to the German gymnasium. 

Brownson is the main figure in Christopher Lasch's bravura study of Progressivism, The True and Only Heaven, being offered there as the 
best fruit of American democratic orchards, a man who, having seemingly tried every major scheme of meaning the new nation had to offer, 
settled on trusting ordinary people as the best course into the future. 



In Opposition to Centralization (1839).