THE PRUSSIAN PARTITION 91Gymnazia in every town and city. At the primary level, elementary schools or
Volkscbule appeared in every parish. By 1848, 82. per cent of children were
attending school. Educational reforms, like most things in Prussia were inspired
by a characteristic blend of liberal and authoritarian motives. The provision of
universal education was furthered on the one hand by humanitarian progres-
sives, who saw it as an essential ingredient of the campaign against child labour,
and on the other hand by the Army's demand for literate recruits. Pedagogical
methods were largely inspired by the theories of Jean-Henri Pestalozzi, whose
treatise, How Gertrude educates her children (1801), remained a standard text
in the training colleges, long after it had profoundly impressed Humboldt. In
theory, Prussian children were to be taught self-reliance and self-fulfilment in an
atmosphere designed to awake and nurture the natural talents of the individual,
rather than to impose a code of external values. In practice, they were consigned
to the mercies of a narrow-minded corps of state-trained schoolmasters, who all
too often descended into the villages with the God-given air of cultural recruit-
ing sergeants. Hence, somewhat ambiguously, they were expected to develop
both the virtues of 'autonomous, inner-directed man' and the automatic reflexes
of loyal, grateful subjects. Great emphasis was laid on technical education. Yet
there was a clear distinction between the practical skills and vocational training
in the Volkschule thought suitable for the masses and the scientific, investiga-
tory spirit reserved for the elite of the Gymnazium. Polish anxieties, such as they
were, centred on the language issue. Although little effort was made before the
1870s to suppress Polish schools, there was equally little attempt to support
them, or to finance them from state funds. There were no Polish institutions of
higher learning; and outside Posnania, the state Gymnazium at Kulm
(Chehnno) in West Prussia was the only one to use Polish as the language of
instruction. In the primary grades, Polish schools were established in all areas
where the population was predominantly Polish-speaking: yet instruction in
Polish was largely viewed as a preliminary aid to the teaching of German, and
as a means of preparing children for the higher, Germanized grades. The situa-
tion resembled that in Wales or Western Scotland where the British authorities
gave exclusive preference to the teaching of English. After 1872, Germanization
was systematically enforced at all levels. In 1911, in Posnania alone, a network
of 2,992 schools served a population of two million — as compared with barely
four thousand in the Russian Congress Kingdom serving a population almost
five times greater. By that time, illiteracy had been eliminated. But the Poles
were not completely Germanized. Polish literacy was encouraged by voluntary
associations such as the Society for Popular Education (TOL) in Posen, and
above all, by the Society for Popular Reading-Rooms (TCL) which from 1880
onwards created a system of two thousand Polish libraries from Bochum to
Bromberg.
The most unequivocal formulation of Prussian attitudes towards the Poles
was made, not surprisingly, by Bismarck himself. At the time of the January
Rising in Russian Poland, a series of diplomatic canards was staged by people