The Prussians, reeling from Napoleon’s near annihilation of their state in 1806—07, draw from the principles expounded by Locke and Rousseau and set about the creation of a new three-tiered education system.

Leading Prussian thinkers, contemplating their defeat at Jena, attribute their military loss to soldiers’ thinking only of themselves during the stress of battle.

Prussian transcendentalist idealist philosopher Johann Gottlieb Fichte, in his Addresses to the German Nation, delivered before crowded audiences over the winter of 1807—08 at the Prussian Academy of Sciences in Berlin, expresses his belief that the state is a necessary instrument of social and moral progress, and declares that the children should be taken over and told what to think and how to think it.

Heinrich Friedrich Karl, Freiherr vom und zum Stein, chief minister of Prussia from 1807, drives the Prussian reform movement.

His own estates absorbed into the duchy of Nassau, Stein views a dynamic Prussia as the means to overthrow Napoleon and restore the rights of the imperial knights, whence he originates, within a revitalized German empire.

In his fourteen months as head of government, Stein has created a council of capable ministers protected from royal machinations, abolished serfdom, lifted restrictions on choice of occupation and property ownership, introduced home rule for the cities, and promoted the military reforms suggested by General Gerhard von Scharnhorst.

Under pressure from Napoleon, Stein is dismissed from his post in November 1808 and flees to Austria.