Henry Adams on the Prussian educational system

Still reading The Education of Henry Adams. Last night I ran across these interesting passages, written about Adam's stay, as a recent Harvard grad, in Berlin. As context, Adams had gone to Germany to study law, but quickly realized that he was in over his head in the university, so he enrolled in a regular "high school" school with twelve and thirteen-year-olds to learn the language instead:

Bismarck himself was then struggling to begin a career against the inertia of the German system. The condition of Germany was a scandal and nuisance to every earnest German, all whose energies were turned to reforming it from top to bottom; and Adams walked into a great public school to get educated, at precisely the time when the Germans wanted most to get rid of the education they were forced to follow...

...one could at least say in defence of the German school that it was neither very brutal nor very immoral. The head-master was excellent in his Prussian way, and the other instructors were not worse then in other schools; it was their system that struck the systemless American with horror. The arbitrary training given to the memory was stupefying; the strain that the memory endured was a form of torture; and the feats that the boys performed, without complaint, were pitiable. No other faculty than the memory seemed to be recognized. Least of all was any use made of reason, either analytic, synthetic, or dogmatic. The German government did not encourage reasoning.

All State education is a sort of dynamo machine for polarizing the popular mind; for turning and holding its lines of force in the direction supposed to be most effective for State purposes. The German machine was terribly efficient. Its effect on the children was pathetic...

They never breathed fresh air; they had never heard of a playground; in all Berlin not a cubic inch of oxygen was admitted in winter into an inhabited building; in the school every room was tightly closed and had no ventilation; the air was foul beyond all decency but when the American opened a window in the five minutes between hours, he violated he rules and was invariably rebuked. As long as cold weather lasted, the windows were shut. If the boys had a holiday, they were apt to be taken on long tramps in the Thiergarten or elsewhere, always ending in over-fatigue, tobacco-smoke, sausage, and beer. With this, they were required to prepare daily lessons that would have quickly broken down strong men of a healthy habit, and which they could learn only because their minds were morbid. The German university had seemed a failure, but the German high school was something very near and indictable nuisance.

Adams seems to have had an amazing knack for being in the right place at the right time, possibly because he had the fortune (for good or ill) to be born into a very influential family. At any rate, he seems to be describing, first hand, the very educational system that Bostonians Horace Mann and Adams's own relative, Governor of Massachusetts Edward Everett, had just introduced into the United States as its first public school system. (Reading this, I'm not sure they succeeded entirely, but they did make some headway.) John Taylor Gatto and others, of course, have had plenty to say about the Prussian system elsewhere, but I thought it worth sharing this vivid first hand account.