Who was Horace Mann, and how did he rise to become the foremost spokesperson for universal free public schools? Born in 1796, Mann sprang from humble Calvinist origins in the little town of Franklin, Massachusetts. In hindsight, an apt juxtaposition of Mann's future career in public service and the name of his birthplace. For the town was named for that public servant extraordinaire, Benjamin Franklin. Who before his death, had donated a collection of 116 books to the Franklin town library, making it the nation's first public library. Appropriately, this library was a boon for Mann's youthful education. Early on, Mann was imbued with the Calvinist moral fervor, that was in no short supply in the early decades of the Second Great Awakening. As a young man he dedicated his life to public service. He attended Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, graduating in 1816. Thereafter, Mann studied law at Litchfield Law School, and was admitted to the Massachusetts bar in 1823. By the time he won a seat in the State House of Representatives, as a National Republican in 1827, Mann had the reputation of being an energetic social reformer with amazing rhetorical skills. His crusading efforts, led to the establishment of the nation's first state hospital for the insane, at Worcester, Massachusetts. As a state senator after 1834, Mann took up the cause of temperance, and the rigorous state liquor laws. Yet his greatest interest and foremost concern, was the dire condition of public education in his own state. >> And one of Mann's contemporaries, James G Carter, a member of the Massachusetts House of Representatives, took up the cause of creating a centralized state system of publicly funded common schools. As chairman of the Legislatures Committee on Education, Carter directed passage of a bill to establish a State Board of Education. Although, he fell short of persuading his fellow legislatures to create a state superintendency of common schools. Consequently, the State Board of Education had no real authority over the public schools. It's charge was to enlighten the public, about the need to upgrade the state's districts schools. The law allowed for the appointment of a secretary, whose responsibility was to collect, and disseminate information on educational practice. And to publicize what today might be called Best Practices. >> The Massachusetts Legislature chose Horace Mann, to be the first secretary to the State Board of Education. A position Mann accepted with alacrity, even though, it spelled the end of his political career. The cause of public education became Mann's obsession. A calling that demanded someone of his enormous talent, irrepressible optimism, undaunted indefatigability, and unmatched rhetorical skills. Mann was a minster monkay. A term meaning, that he evangelized for his cause throughout the state. For 12 years, from 1837 to 1848, through a series of widely-read annual reports to the Board of Education, Mann articulated and publicized the critical role public schooling had to play, if the nation were to endure. He took up Thomas Jefferson's oft-repeated argument, that education was the essential prerequisite for a vigilant citizenry. To make intelligent, informed political decisions, citizens had to be able to read, and understand the laws of state and nation. Yet, Mann believed that education had to be more than political, when it came to the task of what he called, making Republicans. Which, echoing Benjamin Franklin, meant educating effective citizens for service to the nation. Public education, also had to have a strong, enduring, moral, component. Mann called for the dissemination of the common school idea, to every district in the state. By common, Mann meant that the school would be a publicly funded entity. At which, all school-aged children of a district, regardless of differences in their social, ethnic, or religious backgrounds, would learn free of charge, a common curriculum. That curriculum's foundation was reading, English grammar, writing, arithmetic and geography, hygiene and vocal music. The school's commonness, and the high quality of education to be imparted there, he forecasted ebulliently, would make it a great equalizer. A balance wheel of the social machinery. A creator of wealth as yet undreamed of. In Mann's idealistic vision, the common school was the panacea for solving all of then nation's social problems, by nipping them in the bud. >> Hm. As for the moral underpinning of a common school education, in Mann's view, the King James Bible was the foundational textbook, to be read aloud by the teacher without comment. As events proved, his strategy was acceptable to the many Protestant sects that dotted the social landscape of the Antebellum era. It was not acceptable to the Catholic Church, which regarded the very presence of the Protestant Bible in a public school, as a travesty of Catholic beliefs. As we will see shortly, the Catholic Church would abandon the common school, for precisely this reason. Horace Mann believed that the appropriate role of the state in a democratic society, was not hierarchical control of public schools, but rather, partnership with school districts. In which, the states would be a source of encouragement, enlightenment, and yes, some funding. The primary responsibility for schools would rest with locally elected school committees, answerable to the citizens whose property taxes paid for the bulk of each district's education expenses. In any event, this is the way public education would work until far into the 20th century. Direct state regulation of public schools wouldn't happen until the early 20th century, with the enforcement of compulsory school laws. Finally, Mann understood that public schools needed qualified teachers. To that end, he played an instrumental role in the establishment of the nation's first normal school. A teacher training school at Lexington, Massachusetts, which opened in 1839. The term Normal School, signified that the school would impart professional norms, or standards for teaching. In summary, Horace Mann and his Whig allies in Massachusetts, and more broadly, New England, launched a movement that would spread as a grassroots phenomenon, to every corner of the nation in the half century following the Civil War. The exclusion of black Americans from the common school movement, is a topic we consider in a later episode. We turn in our next episode, to the ideology of the common school leaders. [MUSIC] [SOUND]
