Humboldt’s School

Ask where the modern school came from and the honest answer is uncomfortable: from a defeated state trying to rebuild an army.

The classroom that most of the world now takes for granted (children sorted by year of birth, seated in rows, moved by a bell, taught a standardised curriculum in a standardised language by a state-certified teacher, examined against a national standard, and issued a certificate the state recognises) is a Prussian design of the early nineteenth century, refined across that century and exported to nearly every country on earth. Its most famous name is Wilhelm von Humboldt, and this chapter argues both that the system deserves its reputation as an extraordinary achievement and that it was built to do what chapter 12 said states needed doing: manufacture a nation out of a population.

What Humboldt actually did, and did not do

Accuracy first, because the story is usually told wrong in both directions.

Prussia had compulsory schooling long before Humboldt. Frederick William I ordered it in 1717; the Generallandschulreglement of 1763 under Frederick the Great required attendance from five to thirteen or fourteen. Enforcement was patchy and the schools were mostly church-run and poor. So the idea did not begin in 1809.

Humboldt's own tenure was short. He headed the Prussian section for culture and public instruction for about sixteen months in 1809–10 and then resigned in frustration. In that time he set in motion a genuine transformation: a coherent three-stage structure from elementary school through the Gymnasium to university; the Abitur as a state examination controlling university entrance; state examination and certification of teachers, making teaching a profession with its own training rather than a sideline for underemployed clergy; and the founding of the University of Berlin in 1810.¹

The sixteen months repay a closer look, because they contain the whole argument of this chapter in miniature. In the two school plans he drafted in 1809, for Königsberg and for Lithuania, Humboldt laid down the principle that there should be one school for everyone before there were schools for anyone in particular: general human formation first, vocational training afterwards and elsewhere, on the ground that a person who has learned to think can be taught any trade, while a person trained only for a trade has been made into an instrument. Even the poorest child, the plans insisted, was to learn how to learn. He sent young Prussian teachers to Yverdon in Switzerland to study under Pestalozzi, whose method treated the child as a mind to be developed rather than a vessel to be filled, and he began converting the training of teachers from an apprenticeship in catechism into a state-examined profession with its own seminaries. Then he resigned, having failed to persuade the king to make the education section an independent ministry, and the system passed into hands with narrower ideas.²

What it became under those hands is the measurable part. The Gymnasium kept a real portion of the Bildung ideal, for the few who reached it. The Volksschule received the other inheritance: obedience, religion, memorisation, drill. And when the state briefly saw its own creation from the outside, it flinched. Schoolmasters had been conspicuous in the revolution of 1848, and the Prussian answer was the Stiehl regulations of 1854, which cut the teacher seminaries back to Bible, catechism, arithmetic and mechanical method. A state that believed its school merely taught children things would not have bothered. This one understood exactly what the institution was, because it had built it.

His ideal was liberal, and it is not what was exported. Humboldt's guiding concept was Bildung (the self-formation of a whole human being, not vocational training and not indoctrination), and his university was to rest on Einsamkeit und Freiheit, solitude and freedom, with teaching and research united and the state paying but not directing. His 1792 essay on the limits of state action is one of the strongest arguments for restricting government interference in individual development ever written; John Stuart Mill took his epigraph for On Liberty from it. Humboldt was, in his own theory, deeply suspicious of national education.³

That is the tension at the centre of this chapter. The most humane theory of education in modern Europe was implemented inside a state apparatus rebuilding itself for war, and what the rest of the world copied was the apparatus.

The other half of the programme

Fichte's Addresses to the German Nation, delivered in occupied Berlin the year before Humboldt took office, had already stated the political purpose out loud. Prussia had lost, Fichte argued, because it had subjects rather than Germans; the remedy was a new national education applied to all children, removing them where necessary from the influence of their parents, to form a will that could not be corrupted.⁴

You do not have to claim that Humboldt agreed with Fichte to notice that Fichte's programme is what a state under occupation was funding, and that the reformers around Stein and Scharnhorst were building the army and the school in the same room, in the same years, for reasons they connected explicitly. Universal service and universal schooling were two faces of one recruitment: the conscription law would summon the body, and the school would have prepared the mind that came with it.

What the institution actually does

Separate the school's stated function from its structural functions. The stated function is teaching children things. The structural functions are these, and every one of them is what a mobilising state needs.

1. It standardises language. A conscript army needs written orders that everyone can read, and a nation needs a medium in which its story can circulate. This meant suppressing what people actually spoke. Eugen Weber's study of France found that as late as the 1860s a quarter of the population did not speak French at all, and much of the rest spoke it as a second language; Breton, Occitan, Basque, Alsatian and Corsican children were punished for using their mother tongue, in some schools by passing a token from offender to offender, with the last holder beaten at the end of the day. Britain ran the same experiment in Wales: the Welsh Not, a wooden token hung round the neck of a child heard speaking Welsh and passed on until the day's last wearer was punished, and behind it the notorious education report of 1847, remembered in Welsh as the Treachery of the Blue Books, which blamed the language itself for Welsh poverty. The technique is precisely the one described in colonial mission schools in chapter 10. It is the same technology; it was simply applied at home first.⁵

2. It standardises the story. A national curriculum in history and geography teaches a population who "we" are, where our borders should be, and who took what from us. France's Le Tour de la France par deux enfants (1877) (two boys crossing a France that has just lost Alsace-Lorraine) sold millions of copies as a school reader. German school histories taught a national destiny; British ones taught an empire on which the sun did not set. This is Anderson's imagined community, produced on a timetable.

3. It standardises time and the body. Fixed hours, the bell, rows, silence, permission to speak, permission to leave the room, marks for punctuality, drill and gymnastics. Foucault put the school in the same family as the barracks, the workshop and the prison (institutions that produce docile, useful bodies through the same techniques of enclosure, ranking and timetable), and the resemblance is not a metaphor; the practices were consciously borrowed.⁶

4. It sorts. The Prussian three-track structure sent most children to the Volksschule and out to work, a minority to the Realschule, and a small elite through the Gymnasium to the university. The sort came early, was administered as examination, and was experienced by the sorted as a verdict on themselves rather than on their circumstances; the sorting tracked social class closely and was legitimated as merit. Every system that copied the structure copied the sorting, and chapter 21 audits the executive floor of the machinery. Here it is enough to notice that the school did not merely reflect the social hierarchy; it renewed the hierarchy each year and issued it a certificate.

5. It certifies. The state, not the guild, church or family, now decides who is qualified. That is an enormous transfer of authority, and it is the mechanism by which a colonial power later decides which Rwandans may hold office: chapter 24.

6. It makes the population legible. This is James C. Scott's term for what a modernising state needs before it can do anything else: standardised names, ages, addresses and measures, a population that can be read from the capital. The school register is a census that updates itself annually; the school year fixes every child's age and place; the examination file follows the citizen for life. A state that can school a population can find it, and a state that can find a population can tax and conscript it. Chapter 12 described the demand. The school was the instrument that supplied it.⁷

The confession, and the theorists

The clearest statement of what the curriculum was doing came from inside the project. In 1882, at the Sorbonne, Ernest Renan delivered the lecture that is still the standard definition of the nation, and it is remembered as a generous one: a nation is not a race, a language or a religion but a daily plebiscite, a will to continue a common life. What is quoted less often is the precondition Renan names: forgetting, and even historical error, are essential to the creation of a nation, which is why, he adds, the progress of historical study is a danger to nationality. Every French citizen, he observes, has already had to forget the massacres of the thirteenth-century south and of St Bartholomew's Day. He was describing the syllabus. The school does not simply teach a national story; it administers the forgetting the story requires, on a schedule, to everyone, checked by examination.⁸

A century on, the scholarship caught up with the confession. Ernest Gellner argued that nationalism is not the awakening of old nations but a requirement of industrial society: an economy of mobile, literate, interchangeable workers can only be produced by a standardised education system, a system on that scale can only be run by a state, and so the industrial world sorts itself into units of one culture, one school system, one state, with nationalism as the demand that the political unit match the educational one. Benedict Anderson supplied the other half: the nation is an imagined community, imagined in a print language among millions who will never meet but who read the same newspapers and the same school atlases; his later editions added the colonial trinity of census, map and museum, the instruments by which a state first teaches itself, and then its subjects, what officially exists. Neither theory is flattering, and neither has been refuted. Between them they compress this chapter into a sentence: the nation did not build the school; the school built the nation.⁹

The export

The system spread because it worked, and because everyone could see what it was for.

The pilgrimage to Prussia became a genre of its own. Victor Cousin inspected the Prussian schools for the French government and published his report in 1831; translated into English by Sarah Austin in 1834, it was read as avidly in Britain and America as in France, and its refrain (a poor, defeated monarchy had built the best schools in the world, so free peoples had no excuse) set the terms of reform for half a century.¹⁰

• United States. Horace Mann toured Prussian and Saxon schools in 1843 and wrote up the tour in his Seventh Annual Report to the Massachusetts Board of Education in frankly admiring terms; the common school movement built on that model, complete with Prussian-style normal schools for training teachers, the first of which Massachusetts had opened in 1839. American educators were explicit that the school would assimilate immigrants into a single citizenry.
• France. Defeat by Prussia in 1870 was widely blamed on German schooling; the epigraph of this chapter was repeated in French as an accusation. The Ferry laws of 1881–82 made primary education free, compulsory and secular, and the connection to revanche was not hidden: battalions of schoolchildren were drilled, and the curriculum taught the lost provinces.
• Japan. The Meiji Gakusei of 1872 built a national system in a generation, with the explicit aim of producing citizens for a modern state and army; the 1890 Imperial Rescript on Education was read aloud in schools before the emperor's portrait.
• The colonies. The same structure arrived with the missions, minus the promotion track. Chapter 10 described what it did there, and when this chronicle reaches Rwanda the export will be waiting: the Groupe Scolaire d'Astrida, founded in 1929 to train the Belgian mandate's clerks, medical assistants and chiefs, taught the Hamitic race doctrine of chapters 23 and 24 as ordinary curriculum, with admission tilted towards the sons of Tutsi chiefs. The machine that manufactured Frenchmen out of Bretons was set to manufacturing races out of Rwandans.¹¹

By 1914 every industrial state had a school system capable of producing literate, numerate, nationally identified young men who could be registered, called up, taught to read a map and a manual, and inserted into a mass army. Then they were.

Forward

By the end of the nineteenth century, Europe had assembled every component of a catastrophe: states that could requisition entire populations (chapter 12); populations taught to identify with those states (this chapter); industrial economies able to produce weapons faster than men could be killed; and (the subject of chapter 14) a scientific-sounding doctrine that ranked human beings by race and taught that history is a struggle in which the fit displace the unfit.

That doctrine had been developed, tested and proven in the colonies. It was about to come home.

Footnotes

1. James C. Albisetti, Secondary School Reform in Imperial Germany (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983); Charles E. McClelland, State, Society and University in Germany, 1700–1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980); Christopher Clark, Iron Kingdom: The Rise and Downfall of Prussia, 1600–1947 (London: Allen Lane, 2006), on the reform era. ↩
2. Humboldt's Königsberg and Lithuanian school plans of 1809 are printed in his collected works; on the teacher seminaries, their politics and their disciplining, Anthony J. La Vopa, Prussian Schoolteachers: Profession and Office, 1763–1848 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1980). ↩
3. Wilhelm von Humboldt, Ideen zu einem Versuch, die Grenzen der Wirksamkeit des Staats zu bestimmen (written 1792, published 1851); English as The Limits of State Action, ed. J. W. Burrow (Cambridge, 1969). Mill's epigraph to On Liberty (1859) is taken from it. ↩
4. Fichte, Reden an die deutsche Nation (1808), addresses 2–3 and 9–11. ↩
5. Eugen Weber, Peasants into Frenchmen: The Modernization of Rural France, 1870–1914 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1976), esp. chs. 6 and 18. Weber's chronology has been contested: see Ted W. Margadant's review essay and later work arguing that French national identity spread earlier and less top-down, but the mechanisms he documents are not in dispute. For Wales, the Reports of the Commissioners of Inquiry into the State of Education in Wales (London, 1847), the "Blue Books". ↩
6. Michel Foucault, Surveiller et punir (Paris: Gallimard, 1975); English as Discipline and Punish (New York: Pantheon, 1977), part three. ↩
7. James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998), part one, on legibility. ↩
8. Ernest Renan, "Qu'est-ce qu'une nation?", lecture at the Sorbonne, 11 March 1882; in English as "What is a nation?", trans. Martin Thom, in Homi K. Bhabha (ed.), Nation and Narration (London: Routledge, 1990). ↩
9. Ernest Gellner, Nations and Nationalism (Oxford: Blackwell, 1983); Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1983; revised edn 1991, which adds the chapter "Census, Map, Museum"). ↩
10. Victor Cousin's report on Prussian public instruction (1831), translated by Sarah Austin as Report on the State of Public Instruction in Prussia (London, 1834); Horace Mann, Seventh Annual Report of the Secretary of the Board of Education (Boston, 1843). ↩
11. Ian Linden, Church and Revolution in Rwanda (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1977); Mahmood Mamdani, When Victims Become Killers: Colonialism, Nativism, and the Genocide in Rwanda (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), on the Groupe Scolaire d'Astrida and the schooling of the Hamitic hypothesis. ↩