Many Americans wish they knew where they went wrong, they worked hard to give their children a better life than they had and yet they are still disappointed. 

It’s not your fault. All Americans have been conditioned to be exactly who you are. 

Let’s look at some history of the American education system and see if we can figure our how we got here. 

As you are about to see, it’s all part of the plan.

The Origins of the American Public Education System: Horace Mann & the Prussian Model of Obedience

Let’s hear it for the Prussian king Frederick the Great. Why? Well, most people may not be aware that America’s model of public schooling is derived from Frederick’s revolutionary system of public education in 18th century Prussia.

History buffs will recall that Frederick was different from most European despots of that era. He was deeply influenced by the Enlightenment and its spreading influence on European intellectualism, artistic expression and socio-cultural evolution. While Frederick walked in his father’s (Frederick William I) footsteps in terms of his ardent fidelity to Prussian nationalism and militarism, he also lived during the convergence of the Age of Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution.

In essence, Frederick’s vision for a nationwide public education system was honed upon the “yin and yang” of cultural and industrial revolutions existing within deep-seated autocratic and nationalistic political systems.

But, why is this important to know? Beyond the fact that building a better future is informed by a deep understanding of the past, America has spent decades trying to “reform” public education, with uneven results.

In The Origin of Modern Schooling, I listed certain characteristics of the schooling that children around the world experience:

• Children are required to attend.
• It runs from kindergarten to grade 12.
• Students are divided by age, not by what they need or want to learn, nor by what they’ve already learned.
• The teacher is the authority. The children provide empty heads which the teacher is paid to fill.
• There is little or no opportunity for students to explore a subject in depth, to develop a passion, to hone a skill. There’s an hour for one subject, then an hour for another.
• Teachers are considered qualified if, and only if, they have the required certificate.
• Whether they can teach well is irrelevant.
• Whether they love or hate children is irrelevant.
• Whether childhood is a happy time is irrelevant. That’s not on the spreadsheet.
• Curriculum is fixed, and taught at a fixed rate, even if that doesn’t work for some students… even if it doesn’t work for anybody at all.
• There is little or no recognition of superb teachers.
• It centers around a standardized curriculum and lesson plans, not real-life experiences.
• Students and teachers alike believe that the main purpose of school is preparing students to pass the exam.

When teachers in 15 countries were asked:  What do your schools focus on? A decisive majority said their schools primarily teach children to pass tests.

The system of education that we use in the United States (and many other nations) is called the Prussian Model. Born of Prussia’s military failings in the Napoleonic Wars, the German kingdom developed an “education” system designed to indoctrinate children, year-by-year, from age 6 to 16, into full compliance with the state and its military leaders. The point was, bluntly, to ensure that “no German soldier would ever disobey an order again.”

The system worked. To the world’s horror, German soldiers and citizens — despite growing up in what seemed like a liberal democracy — a socialist liberal democracy at that — committed any atrocity asked of them during World War II.

The Prussian Model largely explains why American and British schools are so often staffed by compliant rule followers and petty tyrants.

Why Johnny can’t fail

The concept of “Why Johnny Can’t Fail” is a topic of discussion in the context of education. According to the search results, the phrase suggests that Johnny, a student, cannot fail due to various reasons.

The implementation of the Prussian educational nightmare in the United States met some initial resistance. In Carnegie’s home town of Gary, Indiana, the system was implemented between 1910 and 1916, mostly through the efforts of William Wirt, the school superintendent. It involved no academic endeavor whatsoever. It worked so well in supplying willing workers for the steel mills that it was decided by Carnegie to bring the system to New York City. In 1917, they initiated a program in New York in 12 schools, with the objective of enlarging the program to encompass 100 schools and eventually all the schools in New York. William Wirt came to supervise the transition.

Unfortunately for Carnegie, the population of the 12 schools was predominantly composed of Jewish immigrants, who innately recognized what was being done and the nature of the new “educational system”. Three weeks of riots followed, and editorials in the New York Times were very critical of the plan. Over 200 Jewish school children were thrown in jail. The whole political structure of New York that had tried this scheme were then thrown out of office during the next election. A book describing this scenario, The Great School Wars, was written by Diane Ravitch on the subject. Curiously, William Wirt was committed to an insane asylum around 1930, after going around making public speeches about his part in a large conspiracy to bring about a controlled state in the hands of certain people. He died two years later.

In order to make sure that the independence of the one-room schoolhouse and the penchant for communities to hire their own independent teachers would cease, the Carnegie group instituted the concept of “teacher certification” – a process controlled by the teaching colleges under Carnegie and Rockefeller control. No one knew that the Communist revolutions were funded from the United States. The buildup of the Soviet Union, as well as that of Nazi Germany, would also be funded later from the United States in order to get a reactionary public to bend to the will of controlling political factions. It was a plan that worked well in the 1920’s, and worked well again in the 1950’s in the psychological creation of the “cold war”, providing funding for the buildup of the military, industrial and pharmaceutical complex. The “non-thinking” American public never suspected a thing. Such a thing would have been “unbelievable.”

Because the United States was owned by wealthy businessmen, a synthetic free enterprise system was created and anti-trust laws were passed to prevent anyone else from gaining power. Everything that had already been consolidated was “grandfathered” out of the law. It was a brilliant scheme, and it worked very well.

Earlier in the century there were “school boards” in every town. Between 1932 and 1960, the number of school boards dropped from 140,000 to 30,000. Today there are about 15,000 – all controlled by extensions of the Carnegie-Rockefeller educational complex. In 1959, with the advent of the “sputnik” and the public realization that “another country was ahead of us”, the embarrassed educational system was forced to temporarily create a synthetic focus on science which produced a generation of scientists and technicians in order to resolve the apparent deficit in the public mind.

The Prussian educational system only ends up telling or ordering students what to do, rather than helping them think for themselves. Welcome to the final chapter of the destruction of America. 

How the Prussian School System Is Still Indoctrinating Us Today