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| Frederick William I (1688 - 1740) |
Compulsory education has been a feature of industrialised nations for a long time; it is rarely questioned nowadays. This does not mean it is justified, or acceptable.
The eighteenth century Germanic state Prussia was a pioneer in the development of compulsory education, as Murray Rothbard notes.*
It was King Frederick William I who inaugurated the Prussian compulsory school system, the first national system in Europe. In 1717, he ordered compulsory attendance of all children at the state schools, and, in later acts, he followed with the provision for the construction of more such schools. [...]These are what Rothbard believes to have been some of the effects of compulsory state education:
These beginnings were carried forward by his son Frederick the Great, who vigorously reasserted the principle of compulsory attendance in the state schools, and established the flourishing national system [...]
Under King Frederick William III, the absolute State was greatly strengthened. His famous minister, von Stein, began by abolishing the semi-religious private schools, and placing all education directly under the Minister of the Interior. In 1810, the ministry decreed the necessity of State examination and certification of all teachers. In 1812, the school graduation examination was revived as a necessary requirement for the child’s departure from the state school, and an elaborate system of bureaucrats to supervise the schools was established in the country and the towns.
[...] since the State began to control education, its evident tendency has been more and more to act in such a manner as to promote repression and hindrance of education, rather than the true development of the individual. Its tendency has been for compulsion, for enforced equality at the lowest level, for the watering down of the subject and even the abandonment of all formal teaching, for the inculcation of obedience to the State and to the “group” rather than the development of self-independence, [and] for the deprecation of intellectual subjects.* Murray N. Rothbard, Education: Free and Compulsory, Ludwig von Mises Institute, 1999.