The current school system can be traced back to the early 18th century Prussia, Germany. The first school for mass education, i.e. education of all children, in a community (hence called ‘public school’) was created in 1716 by the King Fredrick William-I as a means of solidifying the fledgling Prussian state into a uniform whole. Taken a step ahead by his son King Fredrick the Great, public schools were explicitly designed for the purpose of consolidating the imperial power.
Leading Educator and thinker John Taylor Gatto aptly describes the Prussian thinking at the time:
‘The Prussian mind, which carried the day, held a clear idea of what centralized schooling should deliver:
a. Obedient soldiers to the army;
b. Obedient workers for mines, factories, and farms;
c. Well-subordinated civil servants, trained in their function;
d. Well-subordinated clerks for industry;
e. Citizens who thought alike on most issues; and
f. 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 experiences of animal husbandry and equestrian training, and also taken from the past military experiences.’
Noted American educator Richard Thomas Alexander, in
his historic study of the Prussian education system wrote that the whole scheme of the Prussian elementary school education was shaped with the express purpose of making ninety-nine out of every one hundred citizens subservient. The elementary schools of Prussia were fashioned to make spiritual and intellectual slaves of the lower classes (i.e. the common citizens).
This system of schooling was first brought outside the ‘Germanic world’ (i.e. Prussia and Austria) by the USA in the 1840s by Horace Mann, the father of American public schooling, and from there on it travelled across the world including Japan. It is interesting to note that the USA (the state of Massachusetts to be precise) had passed the compulsory school attendance law in 1852 for all children between the ages eight and fourteen. To prop up schools, there was a penalty for not sending children to school and the violators were to be prosecuted by the city. By the early 1870s, enforcement of the law included appointment of officials to monitor and stop absences.
Building upon the depersonalized uniformity and rigid hierarchy of the Prussian system, an industrial schooling model was designed to produce millions of workers for factories. With its depersonalized learning and strict hierarchy of power, school was the model of cheapest and easiest way to teach literacy on a large scale. And a multi-track educational system was created to sort students from an early age. While the best and brightest were carefully groomed for leadership positions, the majority was relegated to a monotonous education of rote learning and obedient ‘task completion’ (e.g. homework). (Over
time) larger social good become the democratic face of public school system; schools were seen as vital to economic development and in democratizing the participation of all citizens in the same.
As described by the renowned curriculum theorist Herbert Kliebard, social efficiency became an urgent mission in the educational world. To go beyond what someone had to know in order to perform (as an industrial worker etc.) was simply wasteful. No longer was school to be about learning or intellectual development. To optimize society, individual growth was to be surrendered for the greater good. Moreover, just as in Prussia, the lack of freedom and initiative was extended to include the teachers as well. Here too, supported by the industrial leaders of the early 20th century, it was in the interests of social good that these sacrifices were made. Like their counterparts in the factories, teachers were stripped of the power of ‘individual judgment’ and left to work within the tight confines of a ‘scientific’ curriculum (i.e. the entire teaching methodology and resources were rigidly codified).
A very instructive input emerges if we go back to what John Taylor Gatto adds to the context of schools in late 18th century and the early 19th century (and ‘settles’ the debate on the true nature of school education):
‘Under Frederick William II, Frederick the Great’s nephew and successor, 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.’ (www.johntaylorgatto.com)
Further, the social-efficiency model of simplified, work-oriented schooling was given additional support by the new domain of educational psychology. Influenced by Charles Darwin’s evolutionary theory, psychologists such as highly talented polymath Sir Francis Galton perpetuated the notion of genetically transferred inherited intelligence, arguing that children of poor, immigrant, or minority parents may be uneducable. Such thinking was further extended by other prominent psychologists like H. H. Goddard, who went so far as to propose mass sterilization for the ‘lower elements’ of society. What a group of educational psychologists in the early 20th century seems to propagate was that ‘no amount of education or good environment can change a feeble minded individual into a normal one, any more than it can change a red-haired stock into a black-haired stock’ (in Goddard’s words).
Even the ‘founder of scientific management’ Frederick Winslow Taylor indirectly got endorsing micro-management of school tasks – scientific management became the preferred management style in schools.
Our schooling system is still locked into the Prussian-industrial framework of fear, isolation, and monotony. For both students and teachers, procedure is emphasized over innovation, uniformity over individual expression, and control over empowerment. It is therefore not surprising that the majority of classrooms have changed little in over two hundred years.
At the same time, you are forced to change only when you fail. And the public schools are not failing at all. They are faithfully producing the results they were designed to generate – ‘adequately literate’, obedient industrial workers. In fact, public schools have succeeded beyond their designer’s greatest expectations. Despite tremendous advancements in technology, human rights, and social awareness, the system engineered in the 1760s by King Fredrick the Great still succeeds in dampening the creative spirit of its students, fostering mediocrity, and ensuring a subservient population. Deeply ingrained into our collective psyche, the legacy of the centrally controlled, highly scripted classroom continues. Trapped in an educational model explicitly engineered to breed submission and apathy, it is not surprising that student results remain dismal.
This greatly insightful perspective is extensively drawn from parts of writing by Yehudi Meshchaninov, titled ‘The Prussian – Industrial history of public schooling’. The full article can be accessed at
Source:
http://school.namaya.com/newamericanacademy/images/the-prussian-industrial-history-of-public-schooling1.pdf
Goddard’s quote is obtained from
http:/www.american-buddha.com/lit.waragainstweakblack.1.5.htm%20
