PUBLIC EDUCATION ORIGIN

A New Model

In 1806, Germany, then known as Prussia, maintained an army of paid professional soldiers. A defeat by Napoleon and the amateur French army at the battle of Jena was a severe wound to Prussian national pride. A series of well-written stinging speeches by atheist philosopher Johann Fichte, titled “Addresses to the German Nation,” urged the idea that individual rights and liberties must be sublimated to the good of the nation. To achieve that end, children must be separated from their religious parents and have ingrained into them, from a young age, ideas and skills that would ensure the supremacy of the fatherland. As Stephen Covey might have put it, Prussia began “with the end in mind” and those ends were the transferring of obedience from the parents to the state, knowledge sufficient only for one’s appointed place in life (anything above that would make one discontented with one’s lot), and national uniformity of thought, word, and deed (Gatto, 132-133)

Even before Prussia’s school system was in place, their army’s impressive victorious return engagement against Napoleon won them the admiration of the American people. When America gave a poor showing at the hands of the British during the War of 1812, America’s admiration for Prussia increased and a small covert group formed whose stated purpose was to “Germanize” American education, beginning in neighborhoods where the American poor and new immigrants resided, large groups which needed not only teaching, but inculturating into American history and language in order to successfully join the growing ranks of the wage laborers. (Gatto, 134) The focus of education had shifted from imparting “religion, morality, and knowledge” to, as Thomas Jefferson put it in 1778, “promoting the public happiness.” (“A Bill for the More General Diffusing of Knowledge”)