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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