History of Compulsory Education

What Do Hitler, Germany and Today’s Education Systems Have in Common?

What's the point of education?

Our educational system and its compulsory attendance is modeled after that of Prussia which Horace Mann and several of his colleagues visited in the mid 1800’s. The idea was to get young children out of the home and get them accustomed to regimentation and following instructions. It is no accident that compulsory public schooling for the very young began in the early 1800’s in England, France, and Germany – all countries rich in coal to run machinery – and schooling was imported from there to the US and promoted by those involved coal powered industrial mills.

Horace Mann and other early proponents of compulsory schooling did not hide the fact that the purpose of school was not for the good of the individual, but for the good of society as a whole – their view of society in which great armies of workers ran mills and factories without complaint.

Here’s what schooling is all about:

Children’s natural tendency to view things as an interconnected and interrelated whole, a gestalt, is replaced by fragmentation and confusion. The world is divided into ’subjects’. Already the child is out of the real world where the lines between math and science and language and art are blurred if they hardly exist at all. Then in the sterile and cloistered environment of the classroom, endeavors are divided into subjects and examined as if they were distinct and unrelated to each other.

There are many other downfalls of our modern education, and this article is a collection of resources for further reading on the Prussian Education System, the origin of Western compulsory education.  But first a video to set the scene:

Influential People:

• Johann Gottlieb Fichte
• Horace Mann

Further Reading:

• www.psychquotes.com: Revealing Quotes on the Goals of Education, Psychiatry and Psychology
• www.sovereignty.net: The Rise of Global Governance
• www.globalresearch.ca: Education for World Government
• the deliberate dumbing down of america by Charlotte Thomson Iserbyt (book review or download a free ebook version)

If you've enjoyed what you've read so far, you'll certainly enjoy my big-picture thinking in the booklet The 2012 Manifesto. You can read more about it here or just click on the big-ass Download button below and I'll take you straight to the download page.