Giants of American Education: Horace Mann

HORACE MANN HAS BEEN CALLED THE FATHER OF AMERICAN "COMMON," OR PUBLIC, EDUCATION. INDEED, HE WAS A CHAMPION OF THE NON-PRIVILEGED CLASSES, A MAN WHO WORKED TIRELESSLY TO OVERCOME THE INJUSTICES IN OUR 19TH-CENTURY EDUCATIONAL SYSTEM. THIS IS THE FIRST IN AN OCCASIONAL SERIES OF BRIEF BIOGRAPHIES OF GIANTS OF AMERICAN EDUCATION.

In the early 1830s, Horace Mann, a young representative in the Massachusetts legislature, headed a commission to build a "State Lunatic Hospital" to house mentally ill patients. These unfortunate people had previously been incarcerated--often in extremely vile and inhumane conditions--by county sheriffs. Mann insisted that the hospital include the most up-to-date systems of plumbing, ventilation, and food service. He was persuaded that a healthy environment and kindly treatment would alleviate, if not cure, many of the inmates' afflictions.

To the commissioners' dismay and chagrin, shortly after the hospital opened, a patient with a severe persecution mania claimed that the staff was poisoning him, and he threatened violence against other inmates. Then he escaped from the facility, panicking the neighborhood and forcing the commission to authorize several secure rooms for violent patients whose illnesses resisted the effects of humane care.

This lesson in the limitations of enlightened treatment failed to undermine Horace Mann's lifelong faith in the possibility of improving society through appropriate education and environment. This conviction apparently took root in his youth, when Horace's brother, 17-year-old Stephen Mann, skipped a Sunday of preaching to swim in a nearby pond, where he drowned. The loss devastated the boy's mother, widowed less than a year before, and his two brothers and two sisters.

Fourteen-year-old Horace Mann soon felt fear and outrage as well as grief, as the local minister decided that it was his duty, not to provide solace to the bereaved, but to exploit the event as an example to other young people in the parish. He railed against the "incurable viciousness" of those who "profane the Sabbath" and described for them the "lake which burneth with fire and brimstone." Mann later recalled that from this time on, he lost his faith in his family's traditional Calvinism and directed his efforts toward the betterment of society. "All my boyish castles in the air had reference to doing something for the benefit of mankind," he wrote.

Today, there is hardly a school district in the United States that doesn't have a building named for Horace Mann, the "father of the common school." Mann's claims to such paternity rest as much on the way he framed issues that plague public schools today as on his actions as Massachusetts's first Secretary of Education. A tireless public speaker of great eloquence, he learned to adapt the rhetoric of Puritan preachers to a faith in human perfectibility through good public schools.

Associating with anti-slavery and reform leaders, Mann came to his zealous advocacy of public education from a career as a successful lawyer and legislator. As a young representative, Mann had pushed for the regulation of liquor licenses and the reduction of the number of offenses subject to capital punishment. He worked to reduce occasions for imprisonment for debt and enthusiastically supported state investment in the newest transportation technology--railroads.

Although Massachusetts Colony had passed several laws and resolutions in the 17th Century that made its towns responsible for providing education for all children within their boundaries, in fact there was little financial support or enforcement of universal schooling. By the early 19th Century, when Horace Mann was growing up, public schools offered the bare minimum of education, often only to those families that could pay fees. Yearly school terms were rarely more than a few weeks long; absenteeism was extremely high; there were no common textbooks; buildings were inadequate and unequipped; and teachers were usually young, inexperienced, ignorant, and untrained. Wealthy families had long opted for private tutors or elite academies, and poorer families, such as Mann's, might well decide that they could afford to educate only one of several children. As the growth of manufacturing split the populace between laborers and entrepreneurs, differing opportunities for education made class distinctions even more pronounced. The common, or public, schools came to be regarded as charity institutions for the children of small farmers and laborers. There was little support for local or state funding through taxes.

A STATE DEPARTMENT OF EDUCATION

In 1837, Edward Everett, a strong advocate of public education, was elected governor, and Massachusetts received a two-million-dollar windfall from the federal government--payment for services of state militias during the War of 1812. Mann, by then president of the state senate and a friend of the governor, was persuaded to support a bill that earmarked part of this money to establish a state board of education, defined largely as an agency to gather data about Commonwealth schools and to disseminate information about new and useful innovations in teaching. The Board, empowered to appoint a secretary to carry out its mission, turned to Horace Mann.

At the age of 41, a widower without children, a rising political leader, and a prominent attorney with a lucrative practice, Mann had little to gain in undertaking this new career, which he pursued for the next 12 years. During the first year, he visited every town in the Commonwealth, conducting meetings that were designed both to gather facts and to promote support for public schools. Each year, as mandated by law, he wrote a report to the Board, discussing the current state of the schools and their future needs.

These Annual Reports, along with the Common School Journal, which Mann founded, presented important questions of policy and practice as well as statistical data. They became core documents in the movement to reform and standardize education, widely read not only in Massachusetts but across the nation and abroad. Several of the controversies that involved Mann sound remarkably contemporary and reveal the peculiar tension between idealism and pragmatism that has shaped our thinking about public education ever since.

At the core of Mann's thinking was the conviction that it was possible to define a set of values that were essential to citizenship in a democracy and which, while not identified with any particular religious sect, were nonetheless compatible with all. As he saw it, the first responsibility of the public schools was moral elevation. Removal of ignorance and training students to exercise good judgment was an important part of education, but always subordinate to the teaching of appropriate values. "Never will wisdom preside in the halls of legislation and its profound utterances be recorded on the pages of the statute book, until Common Schools ... shall create a more far-seeing intelligence and a purer morality than has ever existed among communities of men," he wrote in the Twelfth Annual Report (1848).

WAR OF THE BOOKS

Throughout his career as an educator, Mann had to defend his conviction that state-organized education could teach positive moral and civic values without favoring any particular doctrine. One of his first initiatives as secretary had been to make available in every school a core library of about 40 books that could be loaned to students and their families. Mann had educated himself sufficiently to enter Brown University at the sophomore level largely by reading through the holdings of the local library in the town of Franklin. These books had been donated by Benjamin Franklin when the town honored him by its choice of name.

Mann soon found that it was much harder for a public official to come up with a list of books acceptable to all taxpayers than for a single philanthropist to suit himself. Fundamentalist ministers pushed for the inclusion of their own works, and printers did their best to promote the books they published.

Soon Mann was involved in a furious correspondence with a certain Mr. Packard, "editorial secretary of the Sunday School Union." Packard wanted children's books that he had written included in the school package. Reading these, Mann found that they described the fearsome eternal fate of young children who die horribly after committing some small offense. When Mann rejected these publications as too sectarian, Packard rallied conservative clergymen to his side and accused Mann and the school board of being biased against religion.

Ultimately, Mann was able to select books that maintained neutrality in religious and political views, but the list reflected his own prejudice against works of fiction in favor of "practical" knowledge. For instance, he rejected the stories of Nathaniel Hawthorne, his future brother-in-law, saying, "They are written beautifully.... but we want something nearer to duty & Business."

Later, as the father of three young boys, Mann declared that his sons should not be read Mother Goose rhymes or the fairy tales of the Brothers Grimm--the wonders of science were to suffice for his children. He was quietly subverted by his sister-in-law, Elizabeth Peabody, who delighted the children with her recitation of nursery verses and tales of giants.

ANTIDOTE TO POVERTY

From the outset, the principle of statewide public education sparked controversies that continued throughout Mann's tenure in office. Struck by the large number of Irish immigrant children living in squatters' camps beside the railroad lines on which their fathers worked, he pushed for mandatory education laws that would require towns and districts to provide schooling for all children, whether permanent residents or not. He also wanted parents held responsible for their children's attendance. But the very immigrant groups the laws were designed to help were among his greatest opponents. Without education themselves, the laborers saw little value in having their children at-tend school when they could work in factories and add to the family income. In fact, they regarded truant officers as "kidnappers."

Property owners whose taxes were required to support schools for immigrant children were equally opposed, and the: newly powerful Jacksonian Democrats, who gained the governorship of Massachusetts in 1839 with the backing of labor groups, set out to abolish the State Board of Education and all its activities.

Mann cited self-interest as well as morality to defend the principle of free education. In the Common School Journal, after pointing out that the country "owes a vast economical debt to that class of people, whose labor has been mainly instrumental in rearing the great material structures of which we so often boast," he argued that "every wise, humane measure adopted for their welfare, directly promotes our own security. For ... the children of this people will soon possess the rights of men, whether they possess the characters of men or not."

In the Twelfth Annual Report of 1848, Mann developed this argument at great length under the heading "Intellectual Education, as a Means of Removing Poverty, and Securing Abundance." He cited figures showing that Massachusetts, because of its dense population, "industrial condition, and its business operations" risked exposure to the "fatal extremes of overgrown wealth and desperate poverty."

The remedy, of course, was education, which he said was "the great equalizer of the conditions of men.... If education be equably diffused, it will draw property after it ... for such a thing never did happen, and never can happen, as that an intelligent and practical body of men should be permanently poor."

Mann himself, however, never managed to turn his own education to financial advantage. He was perennially short of cash, especially following his second marriage in 1843, the subsequent birth of three sons, and the construction of a house in West Newton. Although he found it difficult to live on the secretary's meager salary of $1,500 a year, Mann nonetheless contributed $100 from his own funds to help the town of Middletown build a school for the children of immigrants.

TRAINING TEACHERS

Along with insisting that districts provide schools that met a minimum standard of' quality and that children be required to attend them, Mann is best known for founding the first state-funded institutions for training teachers in the country. The normal schools and the educated corps of teachers they produced increased the professionalism and the financial status of teachers, especially women, and promulgated the idea that teaching was a skill requiring careful development. "Teaching," he wrote in the First Annual Report, "is the most difficult of all arts and the profoundest of all sciences."

A perfect knowledge of the subject matter to be taught was only the first step, in Mann's thinking. Teachers also needed to be able to manage their classrooms. He entered into a long pamphlet war with "31 schoolmasters" of Boston when he charged that they overused flogging and whipping to keep order.

In addition to subject-matter knowledge and the ability to maintain discipline, good teachers had to deliver their information in the way best suited to their students' individual abilities. They needed to have a repertoire of teaching techniques, not only "common methods for common minds," but also "peculiar methods for pupils of peculiar dispositions and temperaments" (Fourth Annual Report).

Mann's conviction that appropriate teaching methods were the key to student learning led him to lengthy research and study of contemporary theories of psychology and cognition. Mann's enthusiasm for the prevailing science of phrenology, an attempt to analyze character and personality by a study of bumps on the head, seems laughable today, but his investigations led him to many very modem-sounding insights into teaching and learning.

He insisted, for example, that rote learning of names and rules was neither effective nor desirable, but that children had to be led to "discover" principles and relationships. He thought teachers should be almost mind readers, entering into their students' minds "to discover what they know and feel and need" and then supplying the necessary information in such form that children can "reach out and seize and appropriate it."

Mann even considered methods of teaching young children to read and took a stand that places him in the center of today's phonics versus whole language battles. In his Reply to the remarks of Boston's 31 traditional schoolmasters, Mann mocked the primers and "Noah Webster's Spelling Book" that were used to teach children the alphabet before they learned to read words:

   By the "old method," the names of the letters, -- the A, B, C ... --were
   first taught. After these letters, came tables of ab and eb, of bla and
   ble, of ska, ske, of bam, flam, etc., etc., an almost endless catalogue,
   and doleful as endless.... I learn that it has taken children, on an
   average, at least six months to master the alphabet, on this plan.... In
   country districts, where there are short schools and long vacations, it has
   generally required a year, and often eighteen months, to teach a child the
   twenty-six letters of the alphabet; when the same child would have learned
   the names of twenty-six playmates, or of twenty-six interesting objects of
   any kind, in one or two days.

Instead, Mann argued for the virtues of a "new method," which sounds very similar to that pushed by proponents of whole language teaching today:

   ... the word is shown to [the child] as a whole. He is made to speak it,
   and is told that the written or printed object means what we mean when we
   speak the word.... the child comes to look upon a book as a magic casket,
   full of varied and beautiful treasures.... The idea that every word has a
   signification is kept perpetually before his mind, until he looks
   habitually for a meaning in printed words, as much as he does in those
   spoken ones.... His mind is kept in an active, thinking state.... After a
   number of words have been taught this way ... some of the letters are
   pointed out. In subsequent lessons the attention is turned more and more to
   the letters, until all are learned.

Mann gave equal attention to methods of teaching spelling and arithmetic, the importance of music in schools, and the content of physical education to promote healthy living habits. He was a tireless collector of statistical information about the number and condition of school buildings, enrollment, qualifications of teachers, and local education budgets and costs.

After laboring as Secretary of Education for the Commonwealth of Massachusetts for 12 years, Mann was named to fill the Congressional seat of John Quincy Adams, who died at his post in February of 1848. During several terms in office, Mann became an important spokesman for the anti-slavery movement, leading the attack on Daniel Webster, senator from Massachusetts, who had deserted the abolitionist movement to support the Fugitive Slave Law. In large part because of the enmity of Webster's followers, Mann lost the nomination for re-election in 1852. He then accepted an offer of the presidency of newly founded Antioch College in Yellow Springs, Ohio. Attracted by the school's policies of co-education, acceptance of African-Americans, and nonsectarian Christianity, he spent the next six years struggling against the continuing attacks of religious conservatives and the young institution's overwhelming financial problems. He died in Yellow Springs on August 2, 1859.

The issues that Mann addressed, in spite of their 19th-Century rhetorical attire, are contemporary. What has been lost since Mann's time is his faith that public education, properly supported and provided, could be the means of creating a better society. In the first half of the 19th Century, a reformer such as Horace Mann, who once acted on the belief that enlightened treatment could cure insanity, could proclaim his "faith in the improvability of the race" and announce the dedication of his work to the "interests of the next generation."

Although it was difficult at times, he succeeded in persuading a majority of his contemporaries that free schools with trained teachers could inculcate desirable social values and simultaneously provide a practical education leading to prosperous and constructive citizenship. Today's educators are limited to a hope that their proposals might bring about a slight improvement on next year's state achievement tests or raise their district's high school graduation rate. The possibility of achieving consensus about the content and promise of education is a fading dream.

AVERAGE MONTHLY SALARIES, INCLUDING BOARD, OF TEACHERS IN 1847

State                     Men     Women

Connecticut             $16.00     $6.50
Indiana                  12.00      6.00
Massachusetts            25.44     11.38
Michigan                 12.71      5.36
New Hampshire            13.50      5.65
New York                 14.96      6.69
Ohio                     15.42      8.73
Pennsylvania             17.02     10.09
Vermont                  12.00      4.75

In his Eleventh Annual Report of 1847, Horace Mann published these average teaching salaries. He wrote that if these salaries are "compared with what is paid to cashiers of banks, to secretaries of insurance-factories, to custom-house officers, Navy agents, and so forth, it will then be seen what pecuniary temptations there are on every side, drawing enterprising and talented young men from the ranks of the teacher's profession."

Sybil Eakin is a freelance writer and editor living in Bloomington, Indiana, specializing in education, and is a contributing editor to TECHNOS. She has developed curricular and workshop materials for educational agencies and publishers, including the Agency for Instructional Technology, National Educational Service, the Center for Excellence in Education at Indiana University, and Glencoe/McGraw-Hill. Her writing has been published in TECHNOS and a number of Indiana University publications its well as those of the Home and School Institute and on a Web site sponsored by Best Practices in Education.

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