The US public schooling system has its roots in Prussia

Public schools serve to manufacture a manageable population and to put down dissent and originality. The template for the American public schooling system can be traced back to the military state of Prussia. The odd fact of a Prussian provenance for our schools pops up again and again once you know to look for it. William James alluded to it many times at the turn of the century. Orestes Brownson, the hero of Christopher Lasch’s 1991 book, The True and Only Heaven, was publicly denouncing the Prussianization of American schools back in the 1840s. Horace Mann’s “Seventh Annual Report” to the Massachusetts Board of Education in 1843 is essentially a paean to the land of Frederick the Great and a call for its schooling to be brought here.

German Philosopher Johann Gottlieb Fichte Addresses to the German Nation (1807) included a series of lectures concerning the “German nation” and its culture and language, projecting the kind of national education he hoped would raise it from the humiliation of its defeat at the hands of the French. In it, he calls for “a total change of the existing system of education” in order to preserve “the existence of the German nation.” Fichte recommended that the German schools “must fashion a person, and fashion him in such a way that he simply cannot will otherwise than you wish him to will,” so that the pupil might go “forth at the proper time as a fixed and unchangeable machine.”

Fichte is considered one of the forerunners of German Nationalism. In an unpublished letter from 1793, Contributions to the Correction of the Public’s Judgment concerning the French Revolution, Fichte expressed anti-semitic sentiments, such as arguing against extending civil rights to Jews and calling them a “state within a state” that could “undermine” the German nation.

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References

• Gatto, T., John. (1992). Dumbing Us Down The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling Chapter 6. Against School (p. 112). Gabriola Island, Canada: New Society Publishers.

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johann_Gottlieb_Fichte#Nationalism

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Type:🔴 Tags: Politics / Education / History Status:☀️