Following up on the last three posts here, here, and here, and with apologies to my long-time readers for whom this is a rehash, let’s map Fichte’s Prussian School reforms of 1807-8 onto the schooling we have now. Credit where credit is due, these ideas come from John Taylor Gatto’s books and essays. All I am contributing is some familiarity with the source materials and players involved.
Recall that Fichte delivered his ideas on school reform listed below in a series of lectures over the winter of 1807-1808. In 1809, the Prussian minister in charge of education announced the founding of the world’s first research university, dedicated to progress through research, and appointed Fichte chair of the Philosophy Department. Here, Fichte could oversee the development of progressive schooling, and gatekeep who would have a say in it.
A new national education was developed in the research universities and spread throughout Prussia and eventually all of Germany and much of the rest of Europe. The key aspects:
- Compulsory for all children for almost all of their childhood
- Run by state certified experts – “educators”
- Any parental role or input prohibited
- Students segregated by age into grades regardless of existing relationships, achievements, or interests
- Rigid, uniform curricula governed every moment of every school kid’s day
- Children had virtually no privacy or room for independent thought – “educators” are expected to manage their every moment in school
- Progress determined by compliance – to get ahead, complete the assigned work successfully.
During this time, a continuous stream of Americans came to study at these new Prussian research universities. Horace Mann observed these new schools and thought them just the thing for America. It took him and other Prussian-influenced American men over a decade of behind the scenes wheeling and dealing, but finally, in 1848, the first compulsory, age-segregated graded classroom school was founded in America, in Boston. By 1900, half of American kids were schooled in these Prussian schools. By 1950, Prussian schooling included virtually all American children.
So, let’s map Fichte’s proposed schooling to modern American schools.
Fichte: The key step to his new national education is to sperate the children from their families and communities for the duration of their schooling.
“It is essential that from the very beginning the pupil should be continuously and completely under the influence of this education, and should be separated altogether from the community, and kept from all contact with it.”
Fichte, Addresses to the German Nation
Modern Schooling: Start schooling as soon as possible and make it mandatory through 12th grade. Lard on pre-school programs, after school programs, homework, sports, and extra-curriculars that are all but mandatory if you want to get into a ‘good’ college. While simply seizing children and keeping them literally separate from their families has not proved practical, our schools do their best to keep them focused on school and away from their families at least emotionally for 12+ years.
Fichte: the goal of schooling is to transfer a child’s natural loyalty to his family and community to the state, in the person of a state-trained and certified Masters.
To put it more briefly. According to our supposition, those who need protection are deprived of the guardianship of their parents and relatives, whose place has been taken by masters.
Ibid.
Modern Schooling: Are parents welcome to sit in on any classes their children take? Can you just show up at your kid’s school and take a look around? Is your input sought on the curriculum? Or rather, is not the attitude that the experts are in control and you, the parents, are in the way? It takes a village, homeschooling is evil, your kids do not belong to you.*
Students must do what the teachers says they must do, or they will ‘fail’. After 4 or 5 generations of parents have been trained in this manner, ‘good’ parents are reduced to being merely enforcers for the state: are you making sure your kids do their homework? Are you reinforcing the school’s disciplinary rules? More subtly than Fichte anticipated, the loyalty of the student has been transferred to the state by the instrument of his parents.
Fichte: the three R’s are not the point of education – loyalty to the state is the point.
Now, assuming that the pupil is to remain until education is finished, reading and writing can be of no use in the purely national education, so long as this education continues. But it can, indeed, be very harmful; because, as it has hitherto so often done, it may easily lead the pupil astray from direct perception to mere signs, and from attention, which knows that it grasps nothing if it does not grasp it now and here, to distraction, which consoles itself by writing things down and wants to learn some day from paper what it will probably never learn, and, in general, to the dreaming which so often accompanies dealings with the letters of the alphabet.
ibid.
Modern Schooling: under the ministration of our schools, more and more functionally illiterate and innumerate Americans are graduated every year. All of history, and indeed, all of American history before education was dominated by state schools, show that reading, writing, and basic math are not difficult or overly time consuming to learn for the vast majority of people. Yet, 12 years of compulsory schooling somehow manages to NOT teach these basic skills?
Fichte: The state must assume the role of the Church. The Church “should not be permitted” as religion gets in the way of proper state education.
Now, if for the future, and from this very hour, we are to be able to hope better things in this matter from the State, it will have to exchange what seems to have been up to the present its fundamental conception of the aim of education for an entirely different one. It must see that it was quite right before to refuse to be anxious about the eternal salvation of its citizens, because no special training is required for such salvation, and that a nursery for heaven, like the Church, whose power has at last been handed over to the State, should not be permitted, for it only obstructs all good education, and must be dispensed with.
ibid.
Modern Schooling: Any questions? Originally, Mann preached a sort of Mere Christianity (of a decidedly Protestant kind) and proposed a non-sectarian, if virulently anti-Catholic, aspect to his proposed compulsory schools. Kids would be taught from the King James Bible, but just the parts that were noncontroversial among the dominant Protestant sects found in early 19th century New England. Oddly enough, the separation of Church and school was at first a compromise of sorts with Catholics, who vehemently objected to the Protestant (and thus vehemently anti-Catholic) spin put on virtually everything taught in Mann’s schools. Eventually, this lead us to where we are today, which is that any religious faith associated with a Christian church of any kind is effectively banned from public schools.
Americans were far too religious for any schooling here to adopt Fichte’s anti-church dogmas. So, just as the goal of complete separation of kids from their families was achieved by other means, God was driven out of schools over the course of a century or so by schools pretending to accommodate Catholics. Now the mask has been dropped, and the native antipathy of the schools toward Christianity of any kind is patent.
The state is a jealous god.
There’s much more to discuss here – which is why I’m writing a book.
* In a subtle theological sense, your children do not belong to you – they are God’s, and you are merely trustees. But this truth does not mean that your kids belong to the state.