Compulsory schooling in Prussia

On August 12, 1763, as the Seven Years' War ended, King Frederick II of Prussia signed the General-Landschulreglement, a school regulation that ordered all children between the ages of 5 and 13 or 14 to attend school. Parents who kept children home could be fined. The text, drafted largely by the pastor Johann Julius Hecker, set rules for teacher qualifications, school hours, curriculum and inspection by local clergy.¹²

Prussia was not the first to try compulsory schooling, since some German states had passed such decrees in the 1600s, and Frederick's father had made a first attempt in 1717. But it was the largest state to build a system. The roots were in the Reformation: Luther had urged rulers to open schools so that all could read the Bible, and Protestant states took on schooling to train obedient and literate subjects. Frederick also wanted loyal soldiers and officials after a ruinous war. In practice the rule was poorly enforced for decades, as rural families needed their children's labor and teachers were poorly paid.¹

After Prussia's defeat by Napoleon in 1806, reformers such as Wilhelm von Humboldt rebuilt the system: state-trained teachers, a graded curriculum, a school-leaving exam, and near-universal enrollment by the mid-19th century. Visitors came to study it. The American educator Horace Mann praised the Prussian schools in an 1843 report, helping inspire the common-school movement in Massachusetts. Critics have long argued that the model was designed as much to produce obedience as learning, but it spread through Europe, North America and Japan as the template for tax-funded mass schooling.¹