89. The
Long Reach Of The Teutonic Knights: The Underground History of American
Education by John Taylor Gatto from archive.org
89. 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.
4. 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.
5.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.
6. In
Opposition to Centralization (1839).
7. Quigley holds the distinction of being the only college
professor ever to be publicly honored by a major party presidential candidate,
Bill Clinton, in his formal acceptance speech for the presidential nomination.
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