> What education did we give them to prosper as an industrialized nation?
That's an odd question, given that Prussian schooling was invented to turn children into productive factory workers.
The model and the curriculum are two separate things and our schools never included industrial education. That and our higher education is far less "vocational" than the countries that more strictly adhered to the system.
There's nothing odd about the question. What's odd is that you assert that conditions 200 years ago are relevant to it.