Mann, Horace

Horace Mann (1796–1859) is widely known as the Father of the Common Schools. Throughout his long and distinguished career, he viewed common knowledge as the sine qua non of a civilized society. As such, only a system of public education, specifically common schools attached to normal teacher training schools, could ensure social and economic progress as well as sustain democracy. To Mann, education and democracy were correlatives; neither could exist without the other. However, what separated Mann from other educational leaders, before and at least since John Dewey, was his ability to be both philosopher and the political activist on behalf of public education.

Like many educated men of his day, Mann turned to teaching as a way to support his own studies. He attended Brown University and enrolled in one of the most prestigious law schools of his day, Litchfield, in Connecticut. A year after he earned his law degree, he was elected to the Dedham, Massachusetts, School Committee. He would serve in both the Massachusetts state house and its senate as well as in the U.S. House of Representatives. In 1837, he was appointed by the governor to a newly constituted board of education and was selected as its first secretary. Mann held this position for 11 years, from 1837 to 1848. It was during his tenure that the first system of public education was developed in Massachusetts.

In his first lecture to the Massachusetts Common School Convention, in 1838, Mann described the current state of public schools as directionless. His plan was to create an organization that would disseminate the best practices of each local community school to all schools. Along with his colleague Cyrus Peirce, he built the state's first normal school in Lexington to train teachers in both pedagogy and subject matter.

Among his many progressive ideas, one rule stood above all others in teaching children, that is, that learning and pleasure are inseparable. Mann opposed corporal punishment and one-dimensional pedagogies that turned teaching into telling and school subjects into mere words on a page. He decried the deplorable conditions in which children learned, arguing that schoolhouses should be neat, attractive, and fittingly comfortable for children to learn. He chided textbook publishers for seeking profits and not publishing quality books appropriate to children. He was an ardent supporter of both public and school libraries, seeking to build collections of secular books for adults and [Page 640]children consistent with his advocacy of the separation of church and state. As for school improvement, Mann believed in standards of excellence that extended beyond individual schools and communities.

To Mann, the moral and social issues always turned on the necessity for a system of public education. He held up education as the most important of all subjects. He could not compromise causes in which he believed, whether the issues be education, temperance, or antislavery. He opened his house in West Newton to Chloe Lee, the first Negro applicant to that normal school. Later in his career, his antislavery views put him in opposition to the great Massachusetts statesman Daniel Webster. Mann, the system builder, understood that slavery itself undermined the potential of public education for all citizens.

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