is the after-effects of
the Napoleonic conquests, especially in Germany. The German states felt
(and subsequent events demonstrate the correctness of the belief) that
systematic attention to education was the best means of recovering and
maintaining their political integrity and power. Externally they were
weak and divided. Under the leadership of Prussian statesmen they
made this condition a stimulus to the development of an extensive and
thoroughly grounded system of public education.

This change in practice necessarily brought about a change in theory.
The individualistic theory receded into the background. The state
furnished not only the instrumentalities of public education but also
its goal. When the actual practice was such that the school system, from
the elementary grades through the university faculties, supplied
the patriotic citizen and soldier and the future state official and
administrator and furnished the means for military, industrial, and
political defense and expansion, it was impossible for theory not to
emphasize the aim of social efficiency. And with the immense importance
attached to the nationalistic state, surrounded by other competing and
more or less hostile states, it was equally impossible to interpret
social efficiency in terms of a vague cosmopolitan humanitarianism.
Since the maintenance of a particular national sovereignty required
subordination of individuals to the superior interests of the state
both in military defense and in struggles for international supremacy
in commerce, social efficiency was understood to imply a like
subordination. The educational process was taken to be one of
disciplinary training rather than of personal development. Since,
however, the ideal of culture as complete development of personality
persisted, educational philosophy attempted a reconciliation of the
two ideas. The reconciliation took the form of the conception of the
"organic" character of the state. The individual in his isolation is
nothing; only in and through an absorption of the aims and meaning of
organized institutions does he attain true personality. What appears to
be his subordination to political authority and the demand for sacrifice
of himself to the commands of his superiors is in reality but making his
own the objective reason manifested in the state--the only way in which
he can become truly rational. The notion of development which we have
seen to be characteristic of institution