The violent origins of public school systems

While public funded education is now considered to be an essential attribute of a democratic state, we must remember that when it emerged in Prussia in the 18th century, it did not emerge out of concern for the Human Rights of children. How could it, when it was a time that even adults did not enjoy – even on paper – Human Rights? After all, this was some 200 years before the advent of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

As expressed by Paglayan (2022) , “public primary education systems are a central feature of modern states. What is puzzling about these systems is that, contrary to popular belief, their emergence and most of their expansion usually took place under nondemocratic regimes. In Europe, most states began to assume control of primary schooling during the early nineteenth century, before the spread of democracy, with absolutist Prussia taking the lead.”

She continues “The Prussian education model emphasizing discipline, acceptance of one’s lot, and respect for authority, is significant because it heavily influenced the design of primary education systems worldwide. Dozens of government officials from Europe and the Americas traveled to Prussia to observe its primary schools; back home, they shared what they learned about designing a public primary education system.”

The central features of mainstreamed education systems, viz

1. compulsory schooling (enforced by the state),
2. national curricula (standardized by the state),
3. professional teachers (licensed by the state), and
4. public funding (by the state)

were originally conceived for disempowerment.

To quote Paglayan once last time, “to prevent education from empowering the masses, central governments introduced comprehensive education laws and regulations that, for example, imposed a national curriculum to control educational content, specified what textbooks to use, gave the state extensive powers to train teachers, established procedures to assess aspiring teachers’ moral qualifications to act as agents of the state, and created a centralized school inspection system.”. And the public funding was required not, as it is seen today, for ensuring universal access, but to ensure universal oppression – this was not the education that the common man wanted, it was imposed on them (often violently through compulsory schooling laws), and of course they were not going to pay out of their pocket for an education that they did not wish to receive.