The excellencies of the Prussian school system prior to 1840 became the theme of flattering reports on the part of educators in many lands. The celebrated philosopher Victor Cousin made it the basis for his plan of educational reform in France; the Scotch, English, and Irish discussed it; Horace Mann proclaimed it to the school authorities of Massachusetts, and Calvin E. Stowe recommended it to the legislature of Ohio. That system may not have possessed all of the virtues which the ordinances quoted by Cousin imply.[41] Yet it had the one excellence to which educationally all others are subsidiary—a well-trained teaching force. Indeed, if there is anything which seems miraculous in the swift and thoroughgoing transformation of school conditions in Prussia during the first forty years of the nineteenth century, it is explained by the provision which the state made for normal schools and the supply, through their agency, of teachers enough to man all the schools. “In the lowest school in the smallest and obscurest village,” says Horace Mann, “or for the poorest class in overcrowded cities; in the schools connected with pauper establishments, with houses of correction or with prisons—in all these there was a teacher of mature age, of simple, unaffected and decorous manners.” Mann also made it clear that every such teacher was possessed of adequate scholarship and special training for the work of the schoolroom.[42] Such a statement could not be made at that time about Massachusetts, where popular education was already two hundred years old, nor could it be made with equal confidence of other German countries, though several of these approximated the Prussian standard and most of them were earnestly promoting education along the same lines and by the use of similar means.
We must therefore regard the generation of the German exodus from which Wisconsin profited so largely in the later 1840’s and the 1850’s, as almost universally literate and usually well grounded in the rudiments of an education. The intelligent, reading, writing, and slow but careful figuring German peasant immigrants constituted the best testimonial to the efficacy of German systems of instruction for the common people. The Gymnasia, the real Schule, the universities, sent forth representatives of the highest German culture to honor the learned professions, the literary, philosophical, and scientific circles of America.
On the basis of formal school instruction alone, the historian of early Wisconsin would be compelled to assign first place in social fitness to the immigrants from Germany. Neither the Irish, the English, nor even the Yankee pioneers on the average had enjoyed as thorough a training as had Prussians, Saxons, Hessians, or Badeners. Yet, school training is never all there is of education, and it may constitute but a small portion of it. No one questions that the social character of Prussian and other German peasants was far higher in 1840 than it had been in 1800, and this was due to a variety of causes, of which schooling was only one. In part it was due to the abolition of serfdom, in part to the reorganization of municipal life; also, largely to the religious agitation of the period, to the movements for political reform, and especially to the widespread, momentous, and gripping spirit of nationalism.
Nevertheless, despite their superb educational equipment plus other incentives, the Prussians still seemed to intelligent American observers in a very retarded social condition. Horace Mann, who wrote most enthusiastically of their schools and was sympathetic toward the Germans in every respect, in a passage of almost classic force and beauty written in 1843, tells us why education in Prussia accomplished for the people so much less than one might expect. For one thing, he says, the pupils left school too early—at the age of fourteen, which was their time for beginning regular and heavy work. Then, too, books for further self-instruction were lacking. There was in Prussia nothing analogous to the Massachusetts district school libraries. “But,” he continues, “the most potent cause of Prussian backwardness and incompetency is this—when the children come out from the school they have little use either for the faculties that have been developed, or for the knowledge that has been acquired. Their resources have not been brought into demand; their powers are not roused or strengthened by exercise. Our common phrases, ‘the active duties of life’; ‘the responsibilities of citizenship’; ‘the stage, the career, of action’; ‘the obligations to posterity’;—would be strange sounding words in the Prussian ear.... Now, although there is a sleeping ocean in the bosom of every child that is born into the world, yet if no freshening, life-giving breeze ever sweeps across its surface, why should it not repose in dark stagnation forever.” The bill of particulars with which the great educator clinches his indictment of the Prussian system, while it aims to describe accurately only the then existing condition in Prussia, might be equally applicable to almost any other absolutist, paternalistic state. All responsibility for the people’s welfare was assumed by the monarch, who in turn was actively aided by a hierarchy of officials in state and church, in the central government and the local administrative areas.
Of this officialdom, particularly in its military and civil aspects, the nobility was not merely the corner stone but the essential part of the structure. The church, loyal to its traditions, was much more democratic, men of every class being found in each of its official grades. The newly developed educational system gave to the common man another significant opportunity, since teaching candidates were drawn in large numbers from the middle and lower classes, and were given at public expense the training necessary to fit them for permanent positions in the various types of schools. On the whole, however, life beyond the school, which among Americans of that day commonly yielded the major part of education, was in Prussia far less fruitful. For, the American, whose formal schooling had been limited, was sure to multiply its efficacy many times through the intensely original character of his activities. In these he was apt to employ everything he had learned, and constantly to learn more for the sake of applying the new knowledge to challenging situations.
The contrast between the average Prussian’s life and the average American’s life was sharp and decisive. The boy leaving school at fourteen in Frederick William’s country was thrust at once into a routine of severe labor, controlled by others. Either he might be on a farm, where his duties were fixed by custom and minutely directed by parent or employer; or he might be apprenticed to a trade which would give him seven years under an exacting master. Assuming that he remained in his native region, his career thenceforth would be determined with the minimum of personal effort. The American boy whose schooling stopped at an early age might go west and start a new farm home in a new environment, with every incentive toward employing his best powers to win unusual success; he might go to the city and engage in some business; attend school to prepare for a profession; or settle down on the ancestral acres under social and economic conditions which called for almost continuous readjustments, and kept his mind on the stretch to bring these about.
The governmental arrangements in America were inherently educational; in Prussia they were the reverse, save when, with revolutionary fury, the people rose to seek their destruction or reform. In Prussia, says Horace Mann, “the subject has no officers to choose, no inquiry into the character or eligibility of candidates to make, no vote to give. He has no laws to enact or abolish. He has no questions about peace or war, finance, taxes, tariffs, post office, or internal improvements to decide or discuss. He is not asked where a road shall be laid, or how a bridge shall be built, although in the one case he has to perform the labor and in the other to supply the materials.... The tax gatherer tells him how much he is to pay, the ecclesiastical authority plans a church which he must build; and his spiritual guide, who has been set over him by another, prepares a creed and a confession of faith all ready for his signature. He is directed alike how he must obey his King and worship his God.”
The schools of Prussia inculcated religion and morality as sedulously as they taught geography, singing, and writing, the methods used being highly praised by American pedagogical experts. This universal insistence on the ethical content of life could not fail to produce results more or less in harmony with the aims of great ethical philosophers, like Kant of Königsberg, a teacher of the learned whose “categorical imperative,” popularized in that epoch, has not yet gone into the philosophical discard. The average German immigrants of the 1840’s knew little of Kant or the Kantian school of ethics. But of honesty, truthfulness, and fidelity to the plighted word they knew much, because those were practical virtues with which in school if not at home all were indoctrinated. Thrift and industry were additional but fundamental virtues which were widely diffused. It is hard for an empty sack to stand upright. The reason why in America a German’s note was more often worth face value than that of some other classes was because the German usually labored unceasingly and saved what he earned, thus enabling him to meet his obligation.[43]
They were not all saints, these Germans, and in the matter of personal morality the Prussians particularly seem in those days to have deserved much of the criticism directed against them.[44] However, it is not necessary to regard even the Prussians as more lax than most other continentals, and their character is always explainable as a vulgarized aping of the low if gilded immoralities of court and aristocracy. Matters of this sort do not lend themselves readily to statistical inquiry. But it can hardly be doubted that in France, Prussia, Austria, or any other country of continental Europe the private morals of the common people were better on the whole than those of the upper classes. In America, where immigrants from those countries came into contact with a self-governing people of simple habits and prevailingly high ideals of personal conduct, though with numerous individual divergences from the type, sharp attention was bound to be directed to this feature in the character of foreigners, and the Germans attracted their full share of suspicion and disfavor from the stricter sort of Americans.
Such suspicions were heightened by certain social customs of the Germans to which Americans reacted adversely. Sunday amusements were all but universal among them. Travelers in Germany dwell upon the gaiety observed in the villages, or in the city parks and the beer gardens, the distinctive costumes of different localities lending color and interest to the scenes. Music was cultivated in every German community; all Germans could sing and a large proportion could perform on musical instruments. One was “as certain to see a violin as a blackboard in every schoolroom.”[45] Wherever Germans gathered together—and Sunday, since it was the weekly holiday, was their day for assembling—there was singing and dancing, usually accompanied by the drinking of beer or wine to stimulate hilarity. This drinking was not necessarily excessive, because most Germans were moderate in their appetites for alcohol, some were unable to spend much, and all were economical (sparsam). The dances differed from those favored in this country, being mainly “round dances,” and the standards of decorum in the relations of the sexes were different also. No wonder that, when German families settled in groups near our own people, Yankee fathers and mothers often shook their heads doubtfully in contemplating the influence upon their children of these unfamiliar social customs.