The Underground History of American Education: An Intimate Investigation Into the Prison of Modern Schooling

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1099085.The_Underground_History_of_American_Education

"The World's Most Courageous Teacher" reveals the inner circle secrets of the American school system. The legendary schoolteacher, John Taylor Gatto, invested over 10 years of dedicated research to uncover some of the most alarming ideas and writings by the creators and advocates of mandatory attendance schooling, which show where the system came from and why it was created. He combined these facts with his personal experience as a teacher for 30 years in New York public schools, where he won many awards, including being named State Teacher of the Year twice, and has authored an all-time classic.

https://www.lewrockwell.com/2010/09/john-taylor-gatto/the-prussian-connection/#ref

The Long Reach Of The Teutonic Knights

In 1876, before setting off from America to Germany to study, William H. Welch, an ambitious young Bostonian, told his sister: “If by absorbing German lore I can get a little start of a few thousand rivals and thereby reduce my competition to a few hundred more or less it is a good point to tally.” Welch did go off to Germany for the coveted Ph.D., a degree which at the time had its actual existence in any practical sense only there, and in due course his ambition was satisfied. Welch became first dean of Johns Hopkins Medical School and, later, chief advisor to the Rockefeller Foundation on medical projects. Welch was one of thousands who found the German Ph.D. a blessing without parallel in late-nineteenth-century America. German Ph.D.’s ruled the academic scene by then.

For an ironic reflection on the success of Prussian educational ideals, take a look at Martin Van Creveld’s Fighting Power (Greenwood Press, 1982). Creveld, the world’s finest military historian, undertakes to explain why German armies in 1914—1918 and 1939—1945, although heavily outnumbered in the major battles of both wars, consistently inflicted 30 percent more casualties than they suffered, whether they were winning or losing, on defense or on offense, no matter who they fought. They were better led, we might suspect, but the actual training of those field commanders comes as a shock. While American officer selection was right out of Frederick Taylor, complete with psychological dossiers and standardized tests, German officer training emphasized individual apprenticeships, week-long field evaluations, extended discursive written evaluations by senior officers who personally knew the candidates. The surprise is, while German state management was rigid and regulated with its common citizens, it was liberal and adventuresome with its elites. After WWII, and particularly after Vietnam, American elite military practice began to follow this German model. Ironically enough, America’s elite private boarding schools like Groton had followed the Prussian lead from their inception as well as the British models of Eton and Harrow.

''German elite war doctrine cut straight to the heart of the difference between the truly educated and the merely schooled. For the German High Command war was seen as an art, a creative activity, grounded in science. War made the highest demands on an officer’s entire personality and the role of the individual in Germany was decisive. American emphasis, on the other hand, was doctrinal, fixated on cookbook rules. The U.S. officer’s manual said: “Doctrines of combat operation are neither numerous nor complex. Knowledge of these doctrines provides a firm basis for action in a particular situation.” This reliance on automatic procedure rather than on creative individual decisions got a lot of Americans killed by the book. The irony, of course, was that American, British, and French officers got the same lockstep conditioning in dependence that German foot soldiers did. There are some obvious lessons here which can be applied directly to public schooling