A Prussian Education For All

Prussia was the first state to introduce free universal compulsory tax funded education.
In the eighteenth century, the modernising kings, such as Frederick the Great, encouraged industry, drained land and turned it into farmland, reformed Prussia's tax system, brought the church under close state control and introduced an efficient bureaucracy.
This was the modern state as we know it today.
The Prussian elite realized that educated, regimented and indoctrinated subjects were more useful to them than the usual peasants and townsmen wandering about doing their own thing.
The state wished to loosen the bonds of family and religion and replace these loyalties with king and country.
The modernizers understood that the schoolmaster could counterbalance the influence of the priests, that the King could replace God as the source of authority and the object of worship, and that young minds could be moulded to learn obedience to a higher, more distant, entity than family or society.
A brainwashed population would learn the Narrative and ask few questions. The people would learn to obey the voice of Authority, and when told they would betray their own kith and kin, put up with unbearable hardship, commit unspeakable crimes, throw themselves on the barbed wire.
The official religion was changed to a moralistic version of Christianity called Pietism, similar to Methodism, a religion that emphasized self discipline, works rather than faith, and above all, obedience.
Obedience to God the Father, dressed up in stern patriarchal disguise, was easily mixed up with obedience to the King.
Reforms were introduced over the years, particularly in 1809, after defeat at the hands of  Napoleon.
In the nineteenth century Progressive governments throughout the world swept away the old order, and ruling elites turned to the Prussian model of education in order to produce disciplined factory workers and self sacrificing soldiers.