88. The Land of Frankenstein: The Underground History of American
Education by John Taylor Gatto from archive.org
Chapter
Seven The
Prussian Connection
Prussian
Fire-Discipline
On approaching the
enemy, the marching columns of Prussians wheeled in succession to the right or left, passed along the
front of the enemy until the rear company had wheeled. Then the whole together wheeled into
line facing the enemy. These movements brought the infantry into two long well-closed lines,
parade-ground
precision obtained thanks to
remorseless drilling. With this movement was bound up a fire-discipline
more extraordinary than any
perfection of maneuver. "Pelotonfeuer" was opened at 200 paces from the enemy and continued up to 30
paces when the line fell on with the bayonet. The possibility of this combination of fire and movement was the
work of Leopold, who by sheer drill made the soldier a machine capable of delivering
(with flintlock muzzle- loading
muskets) five volleys a minute. The special Prussian fire-discipline gave
an advantage of five shots to two
against all opponents. The bayonet attack, if the rolling volleys had done their work, was merely
"presenting the cheque for payment, " as a German writer put it.
— Encyclopedia Britannica, 1 1th
edition, "Prussia"
88. The
Land of Frankenstein
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 1 806 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 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
longer 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 1 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: as late as 1920,
only 32 percent of American kids went past elementary school. 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.
The Prussian mind,
which carried the day, held a clear idea of what centralized schooling should deliver: 1) Obedient soldiers to
the army; 2 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. Much later, in our own time, the techniques of these assorted
crafts and sullen arts became "discoveries" in the pedagogical pseudoscience of
psychological behaviorism.
Prussian schools delivered everything
they promised. Every important matter could now be confidently worked out in advance by leading families and
institutional heads because well-schooled
masses would concur with a minimum of opposition. This tightly schooled consensus in Prussia eventually
combined the kaleidoscopic German principalities into a united Germany, after a thousand years
as a nation in fragments. What a surprise the world would soon get from this successful experiment in
national centralization! Under
Prussian state socialism private industry surged, vaulting resource-poor
Prussia up among world leaders.
Military success remained Prussia's touchstone. Even before the school law went into full
effect as an enhancer of state priorities, the army corps under Blucher was the principal reason for Napoleon's
defeat at Waterloo, its superb discipline allowing for a surprisingly successful return to combat after what
seemed to be a crushing defeat at
the Little Corporal's hands just days before. 3 Unschooled, the
Prussians were awesome;
conditioned in the classroom promised to make them even more
formidable.
The immense prestige
earned from this triumph reverberated through an America not so lucky in its own recent fortunes of
war, a country humiliated by a shabby showing against the British in the War of 1812. Even thirty years after
Waterloo, so highly was Prussia
regarded in America and Britain, the English-speaking adversaries
selected the Prussian king to
arbitrate our northwest border with Canada. Hence the Pennsylvania town
"King of Prussia."
Thirty-three years after Prussia made state schooling work, we borrowed
the structure, style, and
intention of those Germans for our own first compulsion schools.
Traditional American
school purpose — piety, good manners, basic intellectual tools, self- reliance, etc. — was scrapped to make
way for something different. Our historical destination of personal independence gave way slowly to
Prussian-purpose schooling, not
because the American way lost in any competition of ideas, but because
for the new commercial and
manufacturing hierarchs, such a course made better economic sense.
This private advance toward nationalized
schooling in America was partially organized, although little has ever been written about it; Orestes
Brownson's journal identifies a
covert national apparatus (to which Brownson briefly belonged) already
in place in the decade after the
War of 1812, one whose stated purpose was to "Germanize"
America, beginning in those
troubled neighborhoods where the urban poor huddled, and where disorganized new immigrants made easy
targets, according to Brownson. Enmity on the part of old-stock middle-class and working-class populations
toward newer immigrants gave these
unfortunates no appeal against the school sentence to which Massachusetts assigned them. They were in for a
complete makeover, like it or not.
Much of the story, as it was being
written by 1844, lies just under the surface of Mann's florid prose in his Seventh Annual
Report to the Boston School Committee. On a visit to Prussia the year before, he had been much impressed (so he
said) with the ease by which
Prussian calculations could determine precisely how many thinkers,
problem-solvers, and working
stiffs the State would require over the coming decade, then how it offered
the precise categories of training
required to develop the percentages of human resource needed. All this was much fairer to Mann than England's
repulsive episcopal system —
schooling based on social class; Prussia, he thought, was republican in
the desirable, manly, Roman sense.
Massachusetts must take the same direction.
1.
Machiavelli had clearly identified this as a necessary strategy of state in
1532, and even explored its choreography.
2. "For an ironic reflection on the
success of Prussian educational ideals, take a look at Martin Van
Creveld's Fighting Power
(Greenwood Press, 1982). Creveld, the world's finest military historian, undertakes
to explain why German armies in 19 14
1918 and 1939-1945, although heavily outnumbered in the major battles of
both wars, consistently inflicted 30 percent more casualties than they suffered, whether they were
winning or losing, on defense or on offense, no matter who they fought. They
were better led, we might suspect,
but the actual training of those field commanders comes as a shock. While
American officer selection was right out of Frederick Taylor, complete with psychological
dossiers and standardized tests, German officer training emphasized individual
apprenticeships, week- long field
evaluations, extended discursive written evaluations by senior officers who
personally knew the candidates. The surprise is, while German state management was rigid and
regulated with its common citizens, it was liberal and adventuresome with its
elites. After WWII, and
particularly after Vietnam, American elite military practice began to
follow this German model. Ironically enough, America's elite private boarding schools like Groton had
followed the Prussian lead from their inception as well as the British models
of Eton and Harrow. German
elite war doctrine cut straight to the heart of the difference between the truly
educated and the merely schooled. For the German High Command war was seen as an art, a creative activity,
grounded in science. War made the highest demands on an officer's entire
personality and the role of the
individual in Germany was decisive. American emphasis, on the other hand, was
doctrinal, fixated on cookbook rules. The U.S. officer's manual said: "Doctrines of combat operation
are neither numerous nor complex. Knowledge of these doctrines provides a firm
basis for action in a particular
situation." This reliance on automatic procedure rather than on creative
individual decisions got a lot of Americans killed by the book. The irony, of course, was that American,
British, and French officers got the same lockstep conditioning in dependence
that German foot soldiers did.
There are some obvious lessons here which can be applied directly to public
schooling.
3. Napoleon assumed the Prussians were retreating in the
direction of the Rhine after a defeat, but in truth they were only executing a
feint. The French were about to
overrun Wellington when Blucher's "Death's Head Hussars," driven
beyond human endurance by their officers, reached the battlefield at a decisive moment. Not pausing to rest,
the Prussians immediately went into battle, taking the French in the rear and
right wing. Napoleon toppled, and
Prussian discipline became the focus of world attention. The Long Reach Of The Teutonic
Knights
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