90. In Opposition to Centralization (1839).: The Underground History of
American Education by John Taylor Gatto from archive.org
90. The
Prussian Reform Movement
The
devastating defeat by Napoleon at Jena triggered the so-called Prussian
Reform Movement, a transformation which
replaced cabinet rule (by appointees of the national leader) with rule by permanent civil servants
and permanent government bureaus. Ask yourself which form of governance responds
better to
public opinion and you will realize
what a radical chapter in European affairs was opened. The familiar
three-tier system of education emerged
in the Napoleonic era, one private tier, two government ones. At the top, one-half of 1 percent of the students
attended A kadamiensschulen,' where, as future
policy makers, they learned to think strategically, contextually, in
wholes; they learned complex processes,
and useful knowledge, studied history, wrote copiously, argued often, read deeply, and mastered tasks of
command.
The next level, Realsschulen, was intended
mostly as a manufactory for the professional
proletariat of engineers, architects, doctors, lawyers, career civil
servants, and such other assistants as
policy thinkers at times would require. From 5 to 7.5 percent of all
students attended these "real
schools," learning in a superficial fashion how to think in context,
but mostly learning how to manage
materials, men, and situations — to be problem solvers. This group would also staff the various
policing functions of the state, bringing order to the domain. Finally, at the bottom of the
pile, a group between 92 and 94 percent of the
population attended "people's schools" where they learned
obedience, cooperation and correct
attitudes, along with rudiments of literacy and official state myths of
history.
This universal system of compulsion schooling
was up and running by 1819, and soon
became the eighth wonder of the world, promising for a brief time — in
spite of its exclusionary layered
structure — liberal education for all. But this early dream was soon abandoned. This particular Utopia had a
different target than human equality; it aimed
instead for frictionless efficiency. From its inception Volksschulen,
the people's place, heavily discounted
reading; reading produced dissatisfaction, it was thought. The Bell- school remedy was called for: a standard of
virtual illiteracy formally taught under state
church auspices. Reading offered too many windows onto better lives, too
much familiarity with better ways of
thinking. It was a gift unwise to share with those permanently consigned to low station.
Heinrich Pestalozzi, an odd 2 Swiss-German
school reformer, was producing at this time a
nonliterary, experience-based pedagogy, strong in music and industrial
arts, which was attracting much
favorable attention in Prussia. Here seemed a way to keep the poor happy without arousing in them hopes of
dramatically changing the social order. Pestalozzi claimed ability to mold the poor "to
accept all the efforts peculiar to their class." He offered them love in place of ambition. By
employing psychological means in the
training of the young, class warfare might be avoided.
A
curiously prophetic note for the future development of scientific school
teaching was that Pestalozzi himself
could barely read. Not that he was a dummy; those talents simply weren't important in his work. He reckoned
his own semiliteracy an advantage in dealing
with children destined not to find employment requiring much verbal
fluency. Seventeen agents of the
Prussian government acted as Pestalozzi's assistants in Switzerland, bringing insights about the Swiss style of
schooling home to northern Germany.
While Pestalozzi's raggedy schools lurched
clumsily from year to year, a nobleman, von
Fellenberg, refined and systematized the Swiss reformer's disorderly
notes, hammering the funky ensemble into
clarified plans for a worldwide system of industrial education for the masses. As early as 1808, this nonacademic
formulation was introduced into the
United States under Joseph Neef, formerly a teacher at Pestalozzi's
school. Neef, with important Quaker
patronage, became the principal schoolmaster for Robert Owen's pioneering work-utopia at New Harmony, Indiana.
Neef's efforts there provided high-
powered conversational fodder to the fashionable Unitarian drawing rooms
of Boston in the decades before
compulsory legislation was passed. And when it did pass, all credit for the political victory belonged to those
Unitarians.
Neef's influence resonated across the United
States after the collapse of New Harmony,
through lectures given by Robert Owen's son (later a congressman, then
referee of J.P. Morgan's legal
contretemps with the U.S. Army 3 ), and through speeches and intrigues by that magnificent nineteenth-century female
dynamo Scottish emigre Fanny Wright, who
demanded the end of family life and its replacement by communitarian
schooling. The tapestry of school
origins is one of paths crossing and recrossing, and more apparent coincidences than seem likely.
Together, Owen and Wright created the
successful Workingman's Party of Philadelphia,
which seized political control of that city in 1829. The party
incorporated strong compulsion schooling
proposals as part of its political platform. Its idea to place working- class children under the philosophical
discipline of highly skilled craftsmen — men
comparable socially to the yeomanry of pre-enclosure England — would
have attracted favorable commentary in
Philadelphia where banker Nicholas Biddle was locked in struggle for control of the nation's currency
with working- class hero Andrew Jackson.
Biddle's defeat by Jackson quickly moved abstract discussions of a
possible social technology to control
working class children from the airy realms of social hypothesis to policy discussions about immediate reality.
In that instant of maximum tension between
an embryonic financial capitalism and a populist republic struggling to
emerge, the Prussian system of pedagogy
came to seem perfectly sensible to men of means and ambition.
8.
I've exaggerated the neatness of this tripartite division in order to make
clear its functional logic. The system as it actually grew in those days without an electronic technology of
centralization was more whimsical than I've indicated, dependent partially on
local tradition and resistance,
partially on the ebb and flow of fortunes among different participants
in the transformation. In some places, the "academy" portion didn't
occur in a separate institution, but as
a division inside the Realsschulen, something like today's "gifted and
talented honors" programs as compared to
the common garden variety "gifted and talented" pony
shows.
9.
Pestalozzi's strangeness comes through in almost all the standard biographical
sketches of him, despite universal efforts to emphasize his saintliness. In a recent study, Anthony
Sutton claims Pestalozzi was also director of a secret lodge of
"illuminated" Freemasonry — with the
code name "Alfred." If true, the Swiss "educator"
was even stranger than I sensed initially.
10.
During the Civil War, Morgan sold back to the army its own defective rifles
(which had been auctioned as scrap) at a 1,300 percent profit. After a number of soldiers were killed and
maimed, young Morgan found himself temporarily in hot water. Thanks to Owen his
penalty was the return of about half his
profit! Travelers' Reports
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