This is true. While Humboldt designed the overarching structure of the school, Johann Gottlieb Fichte argued that Prussia lost to Napoleon because they were too individualistic and was able to influence ideas of early education in those schools. The aim, through Fichte, became a system designed to break parental bonds, who he believed filled kids heads with selfish, private interests, and in turn, the goal of education was to develop children into workers and soldiers. Fichte famously suggested that a proper education should destroy a student's free will so thoroughly that they could never choose to do anything other than what the state required.
It confuses the students. It presents an incoherent ensemble of information that the child needs to memorize to stay in school. Apart from the tests and trials, this programming is similar to the television; it fills almost all the "free" time of children. One sees and hears something, only to forget it again.
It teaches them to accept their class affiliation.
It makes them indifferent.
It makes them emotionally dependent.
It makes them intellectually dependent.
It teaches them a kind of self-confidence that requires constant confirmation by experts (provisional self-esteem).
It makes it clear to them that they cannot hide, because they are always supervised.[
Maybe the real lesson is that public education has always had both impulses: emancipation and formation on one hand, conformity and state needs on the other
Part of the problem might be that the terms are not used in the same way in the Anglosphere and in Germany.
In Germany, the Prussian Reforms refer to what is described in the article and attributed to Wilhelm von Humboldt, this was in the late 18th century.
What you are probably referring to is the Generallandschulreglement by Johan Johann Julius Hecker under Frederick the Great. This was published in 1763, around 40 years before von Humboldt.
Well, where. Of course the Philosopher and the Dictator will have different positions on the matter. The thing is that (1) there is a dialectic between the two perspectives and that (2) in actual historical instances different parties will have had more space for action.
"Yet over the years, as Humboldt's public education system was adopted, modified and spread around the world, Bildung — the cultivation of our human potential — may well have been the critical piece left out.
Soon, the state's influence on education took hold, with its own agenda. This is explored in part two of the documentary, Humboldt's Ghost."