The Prussian Mandate: From 1763 to the 1819 Draft

1763: the General Rural School Regulation

On 12 August 1763, at the end of the Seven Years' War, Frederick II issued the Generallandschulreglement, drafted largely by the Pietist educator Johann Julius Hecker. It required children in the rural districts to attend school from about the age of five until they could read, know their catechism and answer what the consistory's books required, usually around thirteen or fourteen. Parents who kept children at home could be fined, and school fees were set by the regulation.

On paper it was one of the first general school-attendance laws in Europe. In practice it was weakly carried out. Villages lacked buildings and money, teachers were often discharged soldiers, artisans or sextons paid little, and children were needed in the fields. The aim was a literate, pious, orderly rural population after a ruinous war; the means to reach it were largely absent.

1794: schools become institutions of the state

The Allgemeines Landrecht, the Prussian general legal code of 1794, declared schools and universities to be institutions of the state (Part II, Title 12). Supervision still ran largely through the churches, and local clergy continued to inspect village schools, but the legal claim was now explicit: education belonged to the state's sphere.

1806–1810: defeat and the reformers

Napoleon's defeat of Prussia at Jena and Auerstedt in October 1806 set off a period of reform. Fichte's Addresses to the German Nation (1807–08) called for a national education to remake the people. In 1809–10 Wilhelm von Humboldt led the section for religion and public instruction for some sixteen months. His aim, drawn from the idea of Bildung, was the development of each person's own powers, not obedience; young teachers were sent to study Pestalozzi's methods in Switzerland, and the University of Berlin was founded in 1810.

The reform period therefore carried two impulses at once: national strength after humiliation, and the cultivation of independent minds. Both are in the record, and the later history of the system is partly the history of which one won.

1819: the Süvern draft that never became law

In 1819 Johann Wilhelm Süvern, one of Humboldt's colleagues, completed a draft general law on the constitution of the school system in the Prussian state. It set out compulsory attendance, the duties of parents and communes, the distinction between elementary and burgher schools, teacher seminaries and inspection. This is the text Victor Cousin translated and presented as the Prussian law; in Sarah Austin's 1834 English edition the attendance provisions (Title IV, "Parents or guardians are bound to send their children…") appear at pp. 25–30.

The draft was never enacted as a whole. It stalled in the conservative turn that followed the Carlsbad Decrees of 1819. Compulsory attendance and seminary training spread instead through ministerial regulations and provincial orders over the following decades, unevenly across the kingdom. Clergy kept a large role in local school inspection well into the century. Prussia did not have a comprehensive school law of the kind Süvern drafted until much later.