Horace Mann: Father of Public Education

American educator and reformer, Horace Mann is often called the "Father of Public Education" in the United States. He began his career as a lawyer and legislator. A major force behind establishing unified school systems, he worked to establish a varied curriculum that excluded sectarian instruction and spearheaded the Common School Movement, ensuring that every child could receive a basic education funded by local taxes. His influence soon spread beyond Massachusetts as more states took up the idea of universal schooling. His vision of public education was a precursor to the Supreme Court’s eventual interpretation of the establishment clause and church-state separation principles in public schools.

Many historians today regard Mann as one of the most important leaders of education reform and advocates of public education.

Horace Mann was born on May 4, 1796 in Franklin, Massachusetts, a town in Norfolk County located in the mid-east section of the state. His family owned a farm that dated back several generations. One of his ancestors was among the first settlers of the Massachusetts town of Cambridge. Despite their family background, the Manns were poor and they struggled financially. Neither of his parents had much formal schooling, and the backbreaking farm work probably contributed to his father's death in 1809 from tuberculosis. Mann was thirteen that year and was already showing signs of poor health himself by then.

At the time, Franklin did not have a good school, like many communities in New England. The teacher taught by fear and physical abuse, and the school term rarely lasted more than two months. As a result, what the students managed to learn was either impractical or misinformed. Up to the age of fifteen, he never attended school for more than ten weeks in a year. After attending the village school, he went to Williams Academy in Wrentham, while he earned money braiding straw for the hat factories of Franklin.

From ten years of age to twenty, he had no more than six weeks' schooling during any year. Franklin did have a small library with books donated by Benjamin Franklin. The town of Franklin had been named in his honor. When civic leaders asked if Franklin might like to donate a bell for the town's public square, the scientist and philosopher instead donated a number of books, mostly about history and theology, the study of religions. It wa the first public library in America—and Mann made good use of it, spending much of his teen years reading through the collection.

A second tragedy occurred in Mann's family a year later when his older brother Stephen drowned while swimming.

The town of Franklin was predominantly Congregationalist, a Protestant sect most notable as the religion of the Puritans who settled the Massachusetts Bay Colony in the early 1600s.

Congregationalists were strict about what they could do on a Sunday, which they believed was a day solely to honor God. As such, all work and leisure activities on that day were strictly forbidden. Stephen Mann had died while swimming on a Sunday. Instead of comforting the grieving family, the local minister used the opportunity to warn the townspeople of Franklin what could happen if church rules were disobeyed.

The same pastor also regularly delivered what are known as fire-and-brimstone sermons, speaking in graphic terms of the horrors that awaited people in the afterlife if they did not repent of their sins. Such visions terrified Mann, and he sometimes cried himself to sleep thinking of his brother and father. The negative experience caused him to leave the Congregationalist faith later in his life and avoid most organized religions.

In 1816, the year he turned twenty, Mann decided that he would like to try college. His education to date had been so poor that he needed to take accelerated courses in order to qualify for entrance, and he found Samuel Barrett, a skilled—albeit alcoholic—itinerant, traveling teacher to tutor him in rhetoric, Latin and Greek for six months. Barrett was very proficient in these subjects…when he was sober.

Mann proved so talented a learner that he was able to enter Rhode Island's Brown University as a sophomore and graduated in 1819 as the class valedictorian in 1819. The theme of his valedictorian speech was "The Progressive Character of the Human Race."

Afterward, Mann decided to become a lawyer—the customary professional training at the time. He then studied law for a short time in Wrentham, Massachusetts, working in a law office, but then returned to Brown to be a librarian, and tutored students in Latin and Greek.

In 1821 Mann entered the first law school in the United States, at Litchfield Law School located in Litchfield, Connecticut. He finished the course and was admitted to the bar of Norfolk County, in Dedham, Massachusetts, near his birthplace, in 1823.

In 1843, he married Mary Tyler Peabody. Afterward, the couple accompanied Samuel Gridley Howe and Julia Ward Howe on a dual honeymoon to Europe. They then purchased a home in West Newton, Massachusetts at the corner of Chestnut and Highland Streets. Horace and Mary had three sons: Horace Mann Jr., George Combe Mann, and Benjamin Pickman Mann.

Mann was elected to the Massachusetts legislature in 1827, and in that role was active in the interests of education, public charities, and laws for the suppression of alcoholic drinks and lotteries.

In 1830, Mann married Charlotte Messer, who was the daughter of Asa Messer, the president of Brown University. She died two years later on August 1, 1832. Mann was devastated by the loss and he never fully recovered from the intense grief and shock that accompanied her death.

Like others at the time who advocated reform and modern approaches to social issues, Mann believed that humane treatment and some sort of professional care might improve the health and outlook of the mentally ill. As a result of his efforts, he played a principal role in the passage of legislation creating the State Board of Education and the first state insane asylum in the United States—located in Worcester, Massachusetts. In 1833, he was chairman of its board of trustees. Mann continued to be returned to the legislature as a representative from Dedham until 1833, when he moved to Boston.

While in the legislature he was a member and part of the time chairman of the committee for the revision of the state statutes—and over that time, he influenced a great number of them.

He was elected to the Massachusetts State Senate from Boston in 1835 and was its president in 1836–1837. As a member of the Senate, he spent time as the majority leader, and aimed his focus at infrastructure, funding the construction of railroads and canals.

During Mann's time, New England communities featured some of the oldest public schools in the new United States. These were known as "common" schools. For the most part, though, such schools educated children from the poorest families. The curriculum and teaching—as Mann himself knew firsthand—was ordinary at best. Wealthy parents sent their children to private academies, which survived into the twenty-first century as the prestigious "prep" boarding schools like Phillips Exeter Academy in Exeter, New Hampshire, and the Deerfield and Milton academies in Massachusetts.

There had been a growing movement for additional and improved free public schools in Massachusetts and elsewhere in the rapidly expanding nation. This emerged in the late 1820s and grew stronger over the next decade. A generation earlier, when the former British colonies became states in the new Union, some of the newly drafted state constitutions contained clauses or articles that mentioned public funding for education. Since the 1780s and 1790s, however, there had not been much effort devoted to this idea.

Edward Everett, new governor of Massachusetts, took office in 1837. Everett recognized the need to improve the state's efforts to educate its children. A survey had found that only a third of all school-age children in the state actually attended school.

That same year, Massachusetts received a $2 million payment from the U.S. government—a reimbursement for the service provided by the Massachusetts state militia during the War of 1812.

In 1838 Mann founded the Common School Journal, which he edited over the next decade. He also contributed articles to the publication. The following year, he achieved one of his first major successes when the Massachusetts legislature enacted a law that set the annual school-year term at a minimum of six months. He also won approval for the “War of 1812” funds that gave schools more than $2 million in new equipment, such as desks and chairs to replace the hard, uncomfortable wooden benches and tables. For the first time, classrooms also began to feature blackboards as a teaching aid.

Reading materials were standardized, too. Before this era, textbooks were virtually nonexistent in public schools, and students often brought in the few books their family might own. Some of these were of terrible quality.

Some of this unexpected payout from the treasury was set aside to improve schools in the state. The Massachusetts House and Senate made history by voting to approve a 1837 bill that created the state board of education, the first of its kind in the nation. The board, which would be headed by a governor and lieutenant-governor, would be made up of eight citizens appointed specifically for the task. The Massachusetts legislature also approved funds to pay a state secretary of education, with a salary of $1,000 annually, whose duty it would be to collect information on public schools in Massachusetts and submit a yearly report to the state legislature.

Mann's name appeared on the shortlist of candidates for education secretary. He agreed to take the post, though it meant giving up both his thriving law practice and his career in the state legislature.

Mann used his position to enact major educational reform, advocating for “common schools,” institutions that would be available to everyone, regardless of their ability to pay tuition—funded by local taxes.

"Education … is the equalizer of the conditions of men,” he argued. “The great balance wheel of the social machinery."

Mann began his job by visiting as many of the common schools in Massachusetts as he possibly could. He did this alone, on horseback, over a six-year period, and inspected more than a thousand schools in the state. He also began a one-person public-relations campaign to change perceptions about public education and convince others to see the short- and long-term benefits of better local schools. He held annual county information events, spoke at them himself, and introduced teachers and former students to the audience.

Some of Mann's ideas were controversial at the time, but survived many generations to become fundamental components of the American public education system. When school attendance became required by law in Massachusetts, he argued that it was the parents' duty to make sure their children attended school. Many new immigrant families objected strongly to this, for in some larger families children were sent to work to contribute to the struggling household's income at an early age. But Mann won that battle. Decades later, American parents were still held responsible for making sure their children attended school regularly.

On another occasion, Mann was shocked by some Irish immigrant children he saw playing during the daytime hours amid the filth of a camp that ran alongside a railroad line that was being built. The Irish American fathers took their families with them when they worked as temporary railroad laborers, and Mann urged passage of a statute that would force local school districts to provide education for all the children in the community—not just those whose parents had a permanent address there. This statute survived into the twenty-first century as federal measures that required school districts to serve homeless populations.

Mann believed that universal education would allow the United States to avoid the rigid class systems of Europe. In his twelfth (and last) annual report for the Massachusetts school board, Mann wrote that education “is the great equalizer of the conditions of men—the balance-wheel of the social machinery.” He also argued that universal education would allow the United States to maintain a democracy; all Americans, he thought, “must, if citizens of a Republic, understand something of the true nature and functions of the government under which they live.”

Mann's commitment to the Common School sprang from his belief that political stability and social harmony depended on education: a basic level of literacy and the inculcation of common public ideals. He declared, "Without undervaluing any other human agency, it may be safely affirmed that the Common School...may become the most effective and benignant of all forces of civilization."

Mann believed that public schooling was central to good citizenship, democratic participation and societal well-being. He observed, "A republican form of government, without intelligence in the people, must be, on a vast scale, what a mad-house, without superintendent or keepers, would be on a small one."

While Mann affirmed that "our Public Schools are not Theological Seminaries" and that they were "debarred by law from inculcating the peculiar and distinctive doctrines of any one religious denomination amongst us ... or all that is essential to religion or salvation."

Mann stated that this position resulted in a near-universal use of the Bible in the schools of Massachusetts and that this served as an argument against the assertion by some that Christianity was excluded from his schools, or that they were anti-Christian. Mann believed education could eliminate or reduce human failings and compensate for any biological flaws.

Mann also once stated that,

"It may not be easy theoretically, to draw the line between those views of religious truth and of Christian faith which is common to all, and may, therefore, with propriety be inculcated in schools, and those which, being peculiar to individual sects, are therefore by law excluded; still it is believed that no practical difficulty occurs in the conduct of our schools in this regard."

Rather than sanctioning a particular church as was often the norm in many states, the Legislature proscribed books "calculated to favor the tenets of any particular set of Christians."

His influence, along with that of Henry Barnard and Catherine Beecher, soon spread beyond Massachusetts as more states took up the idea of universal schooling.

The democratic and republican principals that propelled Mann's vision of the Common School have informed our views about public schooling ever since.

Historian Ellwood P. Cubberley said of Horace Mann,

“No one did more than he to establish in the minds of the American people the conception that education should be universal, non-sectarian, free, and that its aims should be social efficiency, civic virtue, and character, rather than mere learning or the advancement of sectarian ends.”

Mann was influential in the development of teacher training schools and the earliest attempts to professionalize teaching. He was not the first to propose state-sponsored teacher training institutes; but, in 1838, he was crucial to the actual establishment of the first Normal Schools in Massachusetts.

In 1843 he married Mary T. Peabody, one of “Peabody sisters of Salem,” whose sister had married famed American novelist Nathaniel Hawthorne. With Mary, Horace Mann had three sons.

Published in 1848, “Education and National Welfare,” was the title of Mann's last official report to the Massachusetts legislature. In the document, he warned that Massachusetts was the most densely populated state in the nation, and its thriving economy had created the most obvious extremes of wealth and poverty in the United States as well. Such conditions, he argued, at a time when social unrest was erupting across Europe between the poor and the rich, might lead to political instability in the United States, too. The remedy for this, he noted in his "Report No. 12," was public education.

"[I]t gives each man the independence and the means, by which he can resist the selfishness of other men. It does better than to disarm the poor of their hostility towards the rich; it prevents being poor."

In the spring of that year, he was elected to the United States Congress as a Whig to fill the vacancy caused by the death of John Quincy Adams. His first speech in that role was in advocacy of its right and duty to exclude slavery from the territories, and in a letter, in December of that year, he said: "I think the country is to experience serious times. Interference with slavery will excite civil commotion in the South. But it is best to interfere. Now is the time to see whether the Union is a rope of sand or a band of steel."

Again he said:

"I really think if we insist upon passing the Wilmot proviso for the territories that the south—a part of them—will rebel; but I would pass it, rebellion or not. I consider no evil so great as the extension of slavery."

He was nearly defeated for reelection, but appealing to the people as an independent anti-slavery candidate, he was re-elected, serving from April 1848 until March 1853.

In September 1852, he was nominated for governor of Massachusetts by the Free Soil Party, and the same day was chosen president of the newly established Antioch College at Yellow Springs, Ohio.

Failing in the election for governor, he accepted the presidency of the college, which he continued until his death. There he taught economics, philosophy, theology, and political science; he was popular with students and with lay audiences across the Midwest who attended his lectures promoting public schools. Mann also employed the first female faculty member to be paid on an equal basis with her male colleagues, Rebecca Pennell, his niece.

Mann was also drawn to Antioch because it was a coeducational institution, among the first in the country to teach men and women in the same classes, Mann and his wife had conflicts with female students, however, who came to Yellow Springs in search of greater equality. The young women chafed at restrictions on their behavior, and wanted to meet with men in literary societies, which Mann and his wife opposed. Antioch struggled financially. In 1859 the college had to be sold and reorganized. The ordeal exhausted Mann, whose health had never been good.

His last commencement address at Antioch to the class of 1859 featured one of Mann's most memorable remarks, one that was repeated often at graduation ceremonies even one hundred and fifty years later. Mann told students:

"Be ashamed to die until you have won some victory for humanity."

He collapsed several weeks after the 1859 commencement and died that summer in Yellow Springs on August 2, 1859 of typhoid fever.

Two years later his body was disinterred from Yellow Springs to the Mann lot in the North Burial Ground in Providence.

Antioch historian Robert Straker wrote that Mann had been "crucified by crusading sectarians." Ralph Waldo Emerson lamented "what seems the fatal waste of labor and life at Antioch."

Mann's wife, who wrote in anguish that "the blood of martyrdom waters the spot.”

By any measure, Mann was one of the most important leaders of education reform of his time. His vision of public education was a precursor to the Supreme Court’s eventual interpretation of the establishment clause and church-state separation principles in public schools. Mann’s non-sectarian approach to public education was criticized at the time (and is still viewed by some today) as hostile to religion and detrimental to both individual and social morals. Some leaders of the Roman Catholic Church, for example, argued that the common schools, while professing to be nonsectarian, in fact embodied general Protestant principles, contrary to the First Amendment.

Mann’s nephew, Julian Hawthorne, son of Nathaniel Hawthorne and Sophia Peabody, described his appearance:

“My uncle, Horace, as I remember him, was a very tall man, of somewhat meager build, a chronic sufferer from headaches and dyspepsia. His hair was sandy, straight, rather long and very thick; it hung down uncompromisingly round his head. His face was a long square, with a mouth and chin large and unmitigably firm. His eyes were reinforced by a glistening pair of gold-bowed spectacles. He always wore a long skirted black coat. His aspect was a little intimidating to small people; but there were lovely qualities in his nature, his character was touchingly noble and generous, and the world knows the worth of his intellect. He was anxious, exacting, and dogmatic, and was not always able to concede that persons who differed from him in opinion could be morally normal ...”

He is buried in the North Burial Ground in Providence, Rhode Island, next to his first wife, Charlotte Messer Mann.

His wife, Mary Peabody Mann, wrote in her biography of him:

“When his is called a “rugged nature,” because he could not temporize, and because he made great requisitions of men upon whom were laid great duties, I see only his demand for perfection in others as well as in himself. ... Principles were more to him than even friends; which is no light praise of one who loved so tenderly, and felt so keenly every suspicion of his motives. ... The tenderness of his character can only be equalled by the moral force with which he assailed whatever he saw to be wrong in the world. ..."