Investor's Business Daily, May 30th, 2007
Horace Mann pioneered America's modern school system, resolute in his dedication and belief that a democratic society needs an educated populace to thrive.
"If we do not prepare children to become good citizens -- if we do not develop their capacities ... then our republic must go down to destruction, as others have gone before it," Mann wrote in his 1844 annual report on education.
In several roles, Mann worked tirelessly toward betterment. He served as a Massachusetts legislator, secretary of the state's first board of education, member of Congress and then president of Antioch College in Ohio. Outfitted with the broad goal of helping humanity, he learned to apply everything he had to see it through.
Albert Edward Winship wrote in an 1896 biography of Mann: "While he did not owe his reputation to his eloquence, literary brilliancy, professional training, statesmanship, religious conviction, temperance zeal, abolition enthusiasm or personal friendships, he could not have been what he was with any of these factors omitted."
All of that came from humble beginnings. Mann (1796-1859) grew up on a farm with only a sporadic formal education; he was largely self-taught.
Born in Franklin, Mass., he availed himself of books at the Franklin Town Library. Years earlier, Benjamin Franklin had helped the library open with a donation of more than 100 books.
"We think he had a pretty irregular common-school education -- it was dictated by the availability of teachers," said Scott Sanders, an Antioch University archivist. "He went to school in some little shed on someone's farm, probably more than one place. School was not as big an influence on him educationally as that library was."
Work To Learn
Mann was able to attend class only a few weeks out of the year and got no free textbooks. He worked braiding straw hats to earn money for spelling, math and reading texts.
Though Mann's childhood was marked by poverty, ill health and tragedy, he let none of those things deter his drive.
When he was 14, not long after his dad died, an older brother drowned while skipping church to go swimming. The local minister held the boy's death as an example to other youths -- and Mann was taken aback. It redoubled his conviction to affect humanity positively.
That conviction "never took the form of wealth or fame," he later observed. "It was rather an instinct which impelled toward knowledge, as that of migratory birds impels them northward in springtime."
Mann started attending Brown University in 1816, urged on by one charismatic teacher who insisted his attendance was possible despite his meager schooling.
"He was pretty smart," Sanders said. "He was valedictorian of his college graduating class in 1819."
Mann went on to Litchfield Law School, joined the bar in 1823 and established a thriving law practice. He was said to win four out of five cases, partly because he would try only those in which he was convinced his client was right.
In 1827 Mann was elected to the Massachusetts Legislature, and in 1833 he won a state Senate seat.
His early efforts were philanthropic. At first he didn't focus solely on education. He was concerned with the disadvantaged. He championed help for the deaf and mute, Winship wrote, and saw to it that an asylum was established to care better for the mentally ill.
"While engaged in efforts to ameliorate the condition of the unfortunate classes, he became convinced that the greatest need in America was the better education of all children," Winship wrote.
Mann then started championing plans begun by other education enthusiasts. "This man just had a burning zeal for public education and kind of did it one-handedly," said Robert Barger, a former professor of education history at Eastern Illinois University who now teaches computer ethics and programming at Notre Dame.
Mann promoted the idea that schools should be state-run. He stepped in to oversee the first such effort as Massachusetts' first secretary of education -- similar to a state superintendent of schools today.
"As president of the Senate, he signed the bill that created a board of education for the state of Massachusetts," Barger said. "He resigned from his position as president of the Senate -- and as an attorney -- and took the position the Senate had just created."
It was a big challenge, because the position itself didn't have a lot of authority. Anything Mann proposed would have to be done through his persuasive abilities, Barger says.
"He only had moral authority, not administrative, much less legislative, authority," Barger said. "And the fact is, he began and kept on in that position for I think 13 years altogether, in what many people have called a missionary zeal."
Barger says Mann lived, ate and slept public schools. He'd sometimes travel all night to give a speech the next morning.
He campaigned successfully for the establishment of consistent, tax-supported common schools outfitted with sufficient supplies and well-trained teachers. Massachusetts by then had many schools in operation, but Mann's influence led to a more formalized school system with better funding, and the idea caught on around the nation.
He had plenty of hurdles to surmount. As a nondenominationalist, for instance, Mann ran into opposition from members of the religious establishment who had their own views on what was appropriate in education.
"Mann's public school system was really designed to simply perpetuate the republic," Sanders said. "You create informed and educated citizens -- they're the ones who are going to be running the republic in the future. That's very Jeffersonian."
Mann issued annual treatises on how to improve education and wasn't afraid to tackle thorny topics. "In each one of these 12 annual reports he addressed a particular issue," Barger said.
One year, he says, Mann spoke out against corporal punishment in schools, a popular practice at the time.
"The schoolmasters of Boston were up in arms," Barger said. "He'd write a brief, they'd write a counter-brief. He was in the minority. ... He was taking on very concrete issues that needed attention. He'd try to get people to come around to his point 15f view."
Mann remained secretary of Massachusetts' board of education until 1848, when he joined the U.S. House of Representatives. There he also sounded off against slavery.
"He just demonstrated such tremendous energy to the cause," Sanders said. "He had several of them."
On To College
In 1853, Mann accepted an offer to become president of the new Antioch College in Ohio.
Six years later, shortly before his death, Mann addressed the graduating class with this admonition: "Be ashamed to die until you have won some victory for humanity."
Mann was a groundbreaker; the title of father of the American public school system is largely deserved, Barger says.
"I think it was four years after he left office (as head of the board of education) that Massachusetts became the first state to pass a compulsory education law," Barger said. "Before this time, no state actually compelled their children to attend any kind of school. ... It was a start in saying yes, we think school is important enough."
