Quote:
Originally Posted by pelathais
Wouldn't you say that most of the "agenda" that troubles most of us is really driven by the Teacher's Union and not necessarily "the government?"
The "Prussian model" that you've attempted to ascribe here is a bit inaccurate. Friedrich Wilhelm August Froebel, who created the "modern" school system and coined the term "kindergarten" (children's garden" - hardly a militaristic ideal) was indeed German, but not Prussian. The Prussian militarism that you appear to dread was a product of the Teutonic Knights and the 1,000 year long German/Prussian expansion into Eastern Europe.
Froebel was a Thuringian (central Germany today, the "West" of his time) - in a completely different country from Prussia in the 1840's with a different outlook, generally speaking. Thuringia was a "hotbed" of Lutheran Evangelicalism. Essentially, they were the "Christian Fundamentalists" of their time in Europe.
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You are addressing an unrelated issue. I don't "dread" Prussian militarism. The structure model of our government schools is called "the Prussian system" accurately. I recommend that you study the history of the creation of the modern school structure model a bit further.
Here,
READ THIS FOR STARTERS.
"Why were the public schools ever established? Did the private sector fail to set up schools or set up too few of them? Were large segments of society barred from obtaining education? Was the education of poor quality? The answer to the last three questions is no. The public schools were not established to make up for any deficiency in people's ability to learn to read, write, do arithmetic, and acquire knowledge of other subjects. The government schools were set up for another purpose entirely. "
'In 1910 Ernst Troeltsch pointed out the obvious: "The school organization parallels that of the army, the public school corresponds to the popular army." The German philosopher Johann Fichte was a key contributor to the formation of the German school system. It was Fichte who said that the schools "must fashion the person, and fashion him in such a way that he simply cannot will otherwise than what you wish him to will."
Importantly, American advocates of compulsory state schooling observed the Prussian system, became enamored of it, and adopted it as their model. As former teacher John Taylor Gatto writes:
"A small number of very passionate American ideological leaders visited Prussia in the first half of the 19th century; fell in love with the order, obedience, and efficiency of its education system; and campaigned relentlessly thereafter to bring the Prussian vision to these shores. Prussia's ultimate goal was to unify Germany; the Americans' was to mold hordes of immigrant Catholics to a national consensus based on a northern European cultural model. To do that, children would have to be removed from their parents and from inappropriate cultural influences."
Gatto emphasizes how the Prussian model set the standard for educational systems right up to the present. "The whole system was built on the premise that isolation from first-hand information and fragmentation of the abstract information presented by teachers would result in obedient and subordinate graduates, properly respectful of arbitrary orders," he writes. He says the American educationists imported three major ideas from Prussia. The first was that the purpose of state schooling was not intellectual training but the conditioning of children "to obedience, subordination, and collective life." Thus, memorization outranked thinking. Second, whole ideas were broken into fragmented "subjects" and school days were divided into fixed periods "so that self-motivation to learn would be muted by ceaseless interruptions." Third, the state was posited as the true parent of children. All of this was done in the name of a scientific approach to education, although, Gatto says, "no body of theory exists to accurately define the way children learn, or what learning is of most worth.'
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