On reflection we may think it strange that results so great should have been achieved by a scheme of education so stupid. The King owed the best features of his plan to suggestions from outside. He had condemned his son to tedious, nay, dangerous idleness: it was Wolden who obtained for him a grudging permission to work. He had set him to learn agriculture by attending board meetings: it was Hille who urged that he should be allowed to see how farming was carried on. The united efforts of Hille and Wolden could not convince him that the heir to the throne needed any books save books of devotion. These faults, though significant, were errors of detail. But the King’s whole plan is open to graver objections. It is in fact based on three of the commonest yet most fatal errors with regard to education. That boys are dough or putty to be placed in a mould and beaten till they take the exact shape of it, that a youth who is destined for a given career will succeed best by trying to make himself a facsimile of some one else who has been successful in it, and that it is good to limit training to the acquisition of professional aptitude—these are errors which Frederick William held in common with pedants and doctrinaires of every era.
From Frederick’s birth onwards he had laboured to give him his own characteristics, even his own vices, in the hope that as his son’s conduct grew like his own, so also would his policy. This was still the aim of all his measures. But the second education is distinguished from the first by the ghastly object-lesson with which it opens and by its appearance of success. The death of Katte affords the measure of Frederick William’s powers as a teacher. It imperilled the health, even the reason of his pupil, but assuredly it was not forgotten. Are we then to infer that the King’s system atoned for its faults by its triumph? That Frederick was bullied into love for his father seems incredible. It is true that in public he spoke little ill of him, either before his death, when it would have been dangerous to himself, or after it, when it would have been detrimental to the office which he had inherited. But neither his motto nor his conduct after 1730 betokened love. “Far from love, far from the thunderbolt,” are not words of affection, nor is it filial piety to cozen, to flatter, and to shun. He addressed the King as “most all-gracious Father,” while he secretly petitioned the foes of Prussia for funds wherewith to play upon his weakness for tall recruits. It was like a foretaste of death, he said, when a hussar appeared to command his presence at Berlin.