American schools graduate legislators who don’t understand our Constitution and voters that don’t know the difference. They produce journalists that no longer seek or report on the truth. Scientists are trained to put public policy and consensus ahead of scientific method. Our schools have created a population eager to erase history in the name of “sensitivity.”

Our nation’s future is trapped in failing schools. Legislators tell us we need to pay more taxes. Teacher unions report they need smaller classes and bigger salaries. The educational oligarchy insists the states need higher standards. Publishing companies compel schools to buy new books and assessments. Technology giants say more technology is needed. They are all wrong.

This is the first in a series that will address the war being waged against our nation; a war that uses our children, held captive in schools that have replaced the teaching of facts with conditioning and thought with indoctrination.

To understand how our education system went wrong, we need to go back two centuries and to another continent.

In 1806, the professional Prussian army suffered a humiliating defeat at the hands of Napoleon’s amateur soldiers. Prussians studied the results and determined that their soldiers were not obedient enough — they were thinking for themselves. Clearly, that had to stop!

Philosopher Johann Frichte concluded that the educational system had failed Prussia. He said: “Education should aim at destroying free will so that after pupils are thus schooled they will be incapable throughout the rest of their lives of thinking or acting otherwise than as their school masters would have wished.” The goal was to create an obedient army and a compliant workforce.

School was made compulsory: education at the point of a state-held bayonet. Leading Prussian families sent their children to elite private schools and would determine the national consensus but the other 94% of the children went to Volksshule where they were not educated, but socialized for obedience. School days were designed around fragmented subjects, divided into short periods to prevent uninterrupted pursuit of interests.

It was this system of Prussian education, designed to destroy moral will as well as intellect, that attracted an American politician. In 1843, US Representative Horace Mann was so impressed with the Prussian education system, he brought it to the United States. Yes, that Horace Mann, the Father of American Public Schooling, the man your neighborhood school may be named for, was able to transform the entire education system of our nation. Horace Mann, along with the self-appointed, morally superior elite of this country wanted to ensure a compliant work-force for the burgeoning industrial revolution.

And so the trap was set. The American child was compelled to participate in a system where the state was sovereign over the family and teachers would be trained in pedagogy rather than subject matter.

Tragically, this is not the end, but the beginning of the story. Subsequent articles will explore how and why our American education system has been transformed and how to restore it.