Mann, Horace (1796–1859)

Among the dozens of men and women who promoted the “common school” as the most important solution to the problems facing American society in the decades before the Civil War, Horace Mann was then and remains the best known. He was not an educator but a lawyer and politician and, above all, a superb publicist for the idea that education, rightly organized, could have an almost magical effect on individuals and on society.

Born in Franklin, Massachusetts, Mann was educated haphazardly and then at Brown University and as a lawyer at Litchfield Law School. While serving in the state legislature he became active in various social reforms of the period. With the establishment of the state board of education in 1837, Mann was appointed its secretary, a position which he occupied until 1848, when he replaced John Quincy Adams in Congress. From 1853 to his death, he served as first president of Antioch College in Ohio. His appointment as secretary of the board of education was a tribute to his political skills rather than to any previous leadership in education, but Mann quickly made himself an eloquent spokesman for currently discussed ideas, derived ultimately from the Swiss educator Johann Pestalozzi and reinforced by the vogue for phrenology, about how to give schooling a more powerful effect.

Though his new position had little authority over local school districts, they were required to submit statistical reports in order to receive state funding, and Mann made powerful use of this information in his Annual Reports, which were read far beyond Massachusetts and indeed beyond the United States. Through these and through his Common School Journal, Mann made himself the most influential spokesman for the emerging program of the common public school. Typically, when a group of New England businessmen settled in New Orleans wanted to establish a public school system, they turned to Mann to recommend one of his allies to become its superintendent.

The problem that Mann identified was not a lack of schooling—Massachusetts had long been one of the best-schooled areas in the world—but lack of system and coordination in a state with hundreds of local communities, each in complete control of its school or schools.

In an address Mann delivered in 1837, he discussed the concern of having nearly 3,000 schools, all teaching the fundamentals of education and at the same time all being self-governed and independent of any coordinated oversight. He advocated for a state governance structure, such as a state superintendent of schools, which would provide support and evaluation of the local schools. He set out, within his limited authority, to make himself that superintending power, with a concern for all the details of pedagogy and of organization, in each of which he was able to find great moral significance.

One of his immediate concerns was the great diversity of schoolbooks in use, which he argued would cause cynicism about the very possibility of truth. Although he would always deny any desire to impose his own Whig and Unitarian views, in fact Mann had a strong tendency to doubt the sincerity of any who differed with him. By creating a library of schoolbooks approved by the board (effectively, by Mann himself) and recommended to local school committees, he sought to ensure that only ideas he thought worthy would be presented in schools. One of the controversies that bedeviled his administration arose when he refused to approve the schoolbooks of the American Sunday School Union for school use, because they conflicted with his own Unitarian beliefs.

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