A Hero of Education

At heart, Mann was an idealist, always on the lookout for good causes. He once said to a friend:

"All my boyish castles  in the air had reference to doing something for the benefit of mankind."

By Peter H. Gibbon

"The molding of minds is about the noblest work that man or angel can do."

—Horace Mann

At heart, Mann was an idealist, always on the lookout for good causes. He once said to a friend: "All my boyish castles in the air had reference to doing something for the benefit of mankind."

I am standing on the lawn of the Boston State House, looking up at a statue of the educator Horace Mann. His left hand holds a book, his right hand reaches out, and over his business suit hangs the scholar's robe. The 9-foot bronze likeness was sculpted by Emma Stebbins, paid for by the teachers and schoolchildren of Massachusetts, and dedicated on July 4, 1865. On that day his friend and fellow humanitarian Dr. Samuel Gridley Howe, in prose characteristic of the 19th century, celebrated "a man whose greatness consisted in his love for his fellow man, in his confidence in their innate goodness, and their capacity for improvement." Why was Mann so venerated then? What makes him a hero for today?

Horace Mann grew up on a farm just outside the small town of Franklin, Mass., a town named after Benjamin Franklin. From an early age, Mann cut wood, raked hay, and pounded flax. "Industry, or diligence became my second nature," he later wrote. As a boy, he read Noah Webster's Grammar and some of the 116 books Ben Franklin had donated to the town. Mann also experienced sorrow. His father died of tuberculosis, and his brother Stephen died four years later, in 1810, when Horace was 14 years old. Stephen had been swimming on Sunday; according to the Calvinist minister Nathanael Emmons, he desecrated the Sabbath and in his unconverted state would go to hell. Bitterly, Mann turned against Calvinism and adopted a lifelong antipathy toward ministers who preached a punishing God.

As a teenager, Mann decided that only nearby Brown University could offer an escape from a life of farming. To prepare for Brown, he studied Greek, Latin, and mathematics and in 1816 entered as a sophomore. He came to love books and revere knowledge. As valedictorian in 1819, he delivered a commencement-day oration titled "The Gradual Advancement of the Human Species in Dignity and Happiness," a speech that reflected his growing interest in humanitarian causes. After graduation, Mann studied law in Litchfield, Conn., moved to Dedham, Mass., and was later elected to the state legislature.

When Thomas Jefferson and John Adams both died on the Fourth of July, 1826, the 50th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence, towns all over America solemnly took note of this amazing coincidence and paid tribute to the last of the Founding Fathers in the weeks following. In Dedham, the town leaders asked Horace Mann to prepare an address. Before a large crowd, which included Adams' son, President John Quincy Adams, Mann praised Jefferson as the author of the Declaration of Independence and Adams as a prophet and peacemaker. John Quincy Adams would later write that Mann's eulogy was "of splendid composition and lofty eloquence."

While a member of the state House of Representatives and later as the president of the Massachusetts Senate, Mann learned how to craft legislation. He attended Ralph Waldo Emerson's lectures and heard the sermons of the well-known Unitarian minister William Ellery Channing, as well as those of Edward Taylor, the prototype for Father Mapple in Moby Dick. At heart, Mann was an idealist, always on the lookout for good causes. He once said to a friend: "All my boyish castles in the air had reference to doing something for the benefit of mankind."

He maintained that high-caliber, tax-supported public schools could produce efficient workers, promote health, eliminate poverty, cut crime, and unite a society fragmented by class and ethnicity.

Mann's commitment to philanthropy was deepened by catastrophe. In 1832, his wife, Charlotte, to whom he was deeply devoted, died at age 23. Disconsolate, Mann isolated himself and sank into a depression that robbed his energy and sapped his idealism. He found it hard to believe in a benevolent God and an ordered universe. Only gradually did he recover. He vowed that he would honor Charlotte's memory by listening to his conscience, helping mankind, and working without respite.

In 1837, at age 41, Mann retired from politics, closed his law office, and accepted an appointment as the secretary of the Massachusetts state board of education, a job that paid a small salary and came with no formal power. In his private journal, he wrote: "The path of usefulness is open before me. ... God grant me an annihilation of selfishness, a mind of wisdom, the heart of benevolence."

For the next 11 years, from 1837 to 1848, Mann traveled all over Massachusetts, peering into dilapidated schoolhouses, perusing antiquated textbooks, and listening to demoralized teachers. He made himself an expert on reading techniques and school construction and studied the best ways to teach geography, science, bookkeeping, and hygiene. To increase his knowledge, he traveled to Europe, observing how highly trained German schoolmasters maintained discipline without corporal punishment and taught reading to very young pupils. He started the Common School Journal, a professional biweekly that contained model lesson plans for teachers. In speech after speech, he tried to convince a skeptical citizenry that their schools were languishing and needed reform.

During his term as the secretary of the Massachusetts board, Mann produced 12 impassioned and detailed reports that were circulated all over America and convinced other states to implement reforms. In those reports, which eventually found their way to France, England, and South America, he maintained that high-caliber, tax-supported public schools could produce efficient workers, promote health, eliminate poverty, cut crime, and unite a society fragmented by class and ethnicity.

Students, he argued, deserved a stimulating curriculum and well-written textbooks adjusted to different age levels. Mann believed that schools should teach students how to read, spell, and write, but their more important goal was to build character. Early examples, he said, were powerful examples, and lessons taught in classrooms would last a lifetime. Mann made large claims for schools, frequently quoting from Proverbs: "Train up a child in the way he should go; and when he is old, he will not depart from it."

Like Jefferson, Mann believed that training in character would produce responsible and virtuous citizens who would make the republic flourish. "Never will wisdom preside in the halls of legislation," he wrote, "until Common Schools ... shall create a more farseeing intelligence and a pure morality than has ever existed among communities of men."

Rather than advocating vocational education for the poor and classical education for the privileged, Mann championed a revolutionary idea: a high level of general education for all citizens.

To build character, Mann recommended that students study exemplary lives. He praised the study of "biography, especially the biography of the great and good, who have risen by their own exertions from poverty and obscurity to eminence and usefulness." In his second report to the voters of Massachusetts, he talked about how reading uplifting books could inspire the young student: "Sages imbue him with their wisdom; martyrs inspire him by their example; and the authors of discoveries ... become his teachers." Rather than advocating vocational education for the poor and classical education for the privileged, Mann championed a revolutionary idea: a high level of general education for all citizens.

Mann's vision required that teachers have intellectual and moral power. They must not only know their subjects thoroughly, but also command a wide range of pedagogical methods and be able to preserve order. So he persuaded the legislature to create teachers' colleges and to increase salaries. Regularly, he celebrated teachers: "Teaching is the most difficult of all arts, and the profoundest of all sciences," he wrote in his First Annual Report.

In his 11-year campaign to improve public schools, Mann would make enemies: wealthy people who favored private schools, workers who depended on their children's labor, orthodox ministers fearful of a Godless curriculum, local politicians resentful of state control, teachers who believed in corporal punishment. But he consoled himself with the belief that "the molding of minds is about the noblest work that man or angel can do."

Mann was not perfect—and we know more about his flaws because he kept a detailed journal. He complained, indulged in self-pity, demonized his enemies. On his way to Nantucket to give a speech, he admitted he was sick of education. And of course, like many crusaders, he made excessive claims for his cause. Behind the soaring rhetoric about the transforming power of education lay a melancholy man, unable to sleep, plagued by illness, morbidly attached to the memory of his first wife. Like many great individuals, even reformers and humanitarians, Mann was ambitious, sometimes egotistical. He liked being the center of attention, and at times seems to have had a martyr complex. Ralph Waldo Emerson made this trenchant remark about genius in his journals: "Take egotism out, and you would castrate the benefactors. Luther, Mirabeau, Napoleon, John Adams, Andrew Jackson; and our nearer eminent public servants,— Greeley, Theodore Parker, Ward Beecher, Horace Mann, Garrison, would lose their vigor."

Horace Mann was the first to articulate a unified vision of how schools could transform, unite, and preserve the republic. Most importantly, he tried to implement his vision.

But I find Mann heroic, worthy of the statue of him that stands in front of the Boston State House. Though born poor, he never craved wealth. He lived on a small salary in dank boarding houses, traveled at his own expense, and gave his savings to the cause of education. Even though he rejected Calvinism and became a Unitarian, he retained Christian charity. He had a conscience that could never be quiet and a belief in America's future that he never relinquished. Idealistic, he combined the incisive mind of a good lawyer with the politician's ability to maneuver.

Others had championed public schools. Horace Mann was the first to articulate a unified vision of how schools could transform, unite, and preserve the republic. Most importantly, he tried to implement his vision. He traveled hundreds of miles by horseback and stagecoach, speaking in towns and cities until his body collapsed and his voice gave out. He roamed the halls of the state Capitol, asking legislators to support his education bills. At night, he wrote the reports which even today demonstrate an impressive range of knowledge, as he shifts from physical education to choral music to phonics.

At the end of Mann's crusade, schoolhouses had been improved, teacher salaries increased, the school year lengthened, and new high schools established. Mann was that rare hero: the practical dreamer and the political idealist. To Thomas Carlyle, the 19th- century apologist for heroes, sincerity was the most important quality of a hero. To Emerson, it was perseverance. Mann had both.

At the end of Mann's crusade, schoolhouses had been improved, teacher salaries increased, the school year lengthened, and new high schools established.

Today, Mann is remembered as the father of American public education, but his career did not end when he resigned his post as secretary of the board. When John Quincy Adams died of a stroke on the floor of the U.S. House of Representatives in 1848, Mann was picked to fill his seat. He crusaded against slavery with the same zeal he had exhibited in his fight for public schools. Defeated in a bid for the Massachusetts governorship, he took over as president of Antioch College in Yellow Springs, Ohio, in 1853, and for five years fought an uphill battle to solidify a school committed to coeducation, equal opportunity for African-Americans, and a nonsectarian Christian morality.

Two months before he died, Horace Mann gave a last speech in which he advised the senior class of Antioch: "I beseech you to treasure up in your hearts these my parting words: Be ashamed to die until you have won some victory for humanity."

Peter H. Gibbon is a research associate at Harvard University's graduate school of education in Cambridge, Mass. This essay was excerpted from A Call to Heroism (c) 2002 by Peter H. Gibbon, and reprinted with the permission of the publisher, Atlantic Monthly Press.

Are Public Schools Hazardous To Public Education?

By Andrew J. Coulson For a diverse nation, we share a remarkable consensus with respect to educating children. As reflected in polls and focus groups, Americans are nearly unanimous in their commitment to certain fundamental ideals: that all children have access to a quality education regardless of family income; that they be prepared for happy and productive lives; that they be taught the rights and duties of citizenship; and that the schools help to foster strong and cohesive communities. These are the ideals of public education.

One hundred and fifty years ago, a band of dedicated reformers declared that progress toward those ideals was too slow and proposed that a new institution be created to more effectively promote them. Led by Bostonian Horace Mann, the reformers campaigned for a greater state role in education. They argued that a universal, centrally planned system of tax-funded schools would be superior in every respect to the seemingly disorganized market of independent schools that existed at the time. Shifting the reins of educational power from private to public hands would, they promised, yield better teaching methods and materials, greater efficiency, superior service to the poor, and a stronger, more cohesive nation. Mann even ventured the prediction that if public schooling were widely adopted and given enough time to work, "nine-tenths of the crimes in the penal code would become obsolete," and "the long catalogue of human ills would be abridged."

Though Horace Mann's promised nirvana has clearly failed to materialize, there is one respect in which he and his fellow reformers were completely successful: They forged an unbreakable link in people's minds between the institution of public schooling and the ideals of public education. As generation after generation has attended public schools and sent its children to public schools, it has become more and more difficult to see the distinction between the institution itself and the principles it is meant to uphold. "If you believe in our shared ideals of public education," goes the mantra, "then you must support the public schools."

Andrew J. Coulson is a senior research associate of the Social Philosophy and Policy Center at Bowling Green State University in Bowling Green, Ohio. He is the author of Market Education: The Unknown History, recently published by Transaction Publishers.

Published: January 27, 1999

The Foundation of Universal Education

By Lynn Olson

In the 20th century, the United States opened wide the schoolhouse doors to the vast majority of its young people. But those advances built on a solid foundation that had been established long before, when the nation embraced the principle of free, universal public education.

"It goes back to the New England tradition of literacy," says the historian Daniel J. Boorstin, "and the belief that all young people should be inducted into the ideas that govern the nation and the community."

In Colonial times, many towns had schools, but attendance was strictly voluntary, and parents usually paid a fee, notes Carl F. Kaestle, a professor and historian at Brown University. School subjects generally were confined to reading, writing, and arithmetic. And students in rural areas might attend for only a few months each year.

"Nowhere was schooling entirely tax-supported and compulsory," Kaestle writes in Pillars of the Republic: Common Schools and American Society: 1780-1860. That gradually began to change in the 19th century, as states in the new republic moved toward greater financial support for public schooling, at least in the elementary grades.

In 1795, Connecticut sold its land in the Western territories for $1.2 million and used the proceeds to establish a permanent school fund, which by 1810 was providing annual assistance to schools. New York state created such a fund in 1805. By the 1820s and '30s, several more states had followed suit, although the money covered only a fraction of the costs of education.

In 1852, Horace Mann, the secretary of the Massachusetts board of education, helped pass the first compulsory-attendance law in the nation, for children of elementary school age.

Mann and other advocates of universal schooling had an almost boundless faith in the ability of public education to advance both national and individual progress. "Never will wisdom preside in the halls of legislation," Mann wrote, "and its profound utterances be recorded on the pages of the statute book, until Common Schools ... shall create a more farseeing intelligence and a purer morality than has ever existed among communities of men."

Wider Access

By the Civil War, Kaestle notes, state governments in the North generally had created common school systems, by enacting laws for tax-supported elementary schools and appointing state school officers. Support for public schooling came later to the South. And while 16 states had compulsory-attendance laws by 1885, most of those laws were sporadically enforced at best.

By 1860, writes David B. Tyack, an education historian at Stanford University, most large cities divided schoolchildren into grades, and by 1870, the concept had spread almost everywhere there were enough students to classify. That year, about 61 percent of Americans ages 5 to 18 were enrolled in some school, Tyack points out. By 1898, that figure was 71 percent, and the typical young American could expect to receive five years of schooling.

Indeed, so many young people wanted to go to school that educators often had nowhere to put them. In 1878, the Detroit school system turned away almost 800 children for lack of seats. And it educated others in rented basements. In 1881, New York City refused admission to 9,189 students for lack of room.

The situation was much worse for black Americans. In 1870, fewer than 10 percent of African-Americans ages 5 to 19 were in school for even part of the year.

Who Will Pay?

As Kaestle observes, though Americans supported the idea of public education, many took issue with the concept of state control and state financing. Attempts to gather all groups into a common school system with a common curriculum met with resistance.

On one side of the debate were reformers like Mann, who supported a standardized curriculum, better-prepared teachers, graded schools, a longer school year, and greater state supervision and regulation. On the other side was a loosely knit opposition made up of advocates of local control, tax resisters, defenders of religious freedom who worried about the dominant Protestant ideology of the schools, and supporters of private education.

Those groups, however, were "not upset about the same things about public education," Kaestle says. "So there's considerable opposition, but it's fragmented."

Horace Mann

Horace Mann Photos