Horace Mann: An Exemplar of Reform

Horace Mann: An Exemplar of Reform
In School and Society: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives
by Steven Tozer, Paul Violas, and Guy Senses.
Page 56 to 75

Early Life

Perhaps no individual more accurately represented through his family and personal biography the successive changes that altered the life and thought of Massachusetts than did Horace Mann. He was a direct descendant of William Mann, who came to the Bay Colony in 1633, and his paternal ancestors included a graduate of Harvard College who became a Puritan minister and another who was a member of the Committee of Correspondence during the Revolution. All had remained in Massachusetts, were Calvinists, and, with the exception of one minister, had been farmers. Horace, born in 1796 at Franklin, Massachusetts, was the last child of Thomas Mann and Rebecca Stanley Mann.

Thomas Mann raised his family on a farm that had been in the Mann family since 1709, when his grandfather, also named Thomas, purchased it. Horace’s child­ hood resembled that of past generations of New Englanders. Subsistence farming provided nearly all life’s necessities. Horace learned not only farming but traditional values while helping with the daily farm chores. The family was also a primary setting for literacy and religious training, with older siblings often helping parents introduce younger children to reading, ciphering, and dogma. Later in his life, after he suggested that he had been largely self-taught, his sister Lydia reminded Horace, “Every day of your life when you were with your parents and sister you were at school and learning that which has been the foundation of your present 1earning.

The church and the public school were twin institutions that reinforced the home in child rearing. Young Horace attended a crudely built, one-room district school where his home training in letters, numbers, morals, and religious dogma was supplemented and reinforced during a six- to eight-week session each year.
Reverend Nathanael Emmons was pastor of the Congregational Church in Franklin, and through his powerful personal resolve, he labored to keep his flock faithful to Calvinist dogma during Mann’s youth. Emmons’s in­ creasing difficulty with church members testified to the winds of change that were beginning to sweep even rural communities in the first decades of the 18th century. For young Horace, the break with Calvinism began the year after his father died, 1809. It was occasioned by the tragic drowning of his brother Stephen, who had been swimming one Sunday while truant from church services. Reverend Emmons used the funeral as an opportunity to warn other youths of Franklin that such straying from God’s commandments would as surely lead them to eternal damnation as it had Stephen. Previously, Emmons had used the death of his own son to is­ sue a similar warning. His son had not experienced a conversion and thus, according to Emmons, was con­ signed to hell. These vivid examples were meant to encourage the young to greater religious commitment. If such “encouragement” had been effective before the turn of the century, it was becoming less effective. Young Ho­ race joined a growing majority of his fellow New Englanders who could no longer abide the stern Calvinism of their fathers. Emmons’s sermon ignited doubts about Calvinist dogma which would eventually lead Mann to Unitarianism.

The economic changes occurring in Massachusetts were also reflected in the Mann family. Shortly before Thomas Mann’s death, the family, like other Franklin families, began to make a straw braid, which they sold to manufacturers for use in making ladies’ straw hats. Not only did this activity engage much of their free time, but it also started the process which drew these rural families away from subsistence farming and into the cash economy. The same forces eventually drew Horace’s older brother Stanley into manufacturing, first as a manager and later as part owner of a factory. When the latter endeavor failed, Stanley joined the multitude of New Englanders who sought their fortune in the “West.”

Mann’s Education

Mann’s deeply felt responsibility to his widowed mother kept him working on the farm until 1816 when he left Franklin to enter Brown College in Providence. Except for the few years of elementary schooling and his home education, his preparation for entry into higher educa­tion consisted of tutelage during the winter of 1816 in classics under Samuel Barett and in mathematics under Reverend William Williams, the Baptist minister in Wrentham. The study with Williams required an eight­ mile round-trip walk each day.

At Brown, after an interview with the president and two faculty members, Mann was admitted with sopho­ more standing. The first year he studied the required curriculum of Cicero, Caesar, Homer, geography, logic, public speaking, and geometry. Apparently, most of the classes were based on memorization of texts and recita­tions to test the memory. Mann made a mark as a pub­lic speaker by engaging in extracurricular forensic activities and as a scholar by graduating first in his class after attending for three years.

Between 1819 and 1822, Mann tutored at Brown and simultaneously studied law. After serving as an ap­ prentice lawyer, he graduated from the Litchfield Law school and in 1823 was admitted to the Massachusetts bar in Dedham, where he began to practice law. During the next four years, Mann firmly established his reputa­tion as a lawyer and an orator. His legal career reflected the importance of commerce in rural Massachusetts, as many of his clients were Boston mercantile firms that en­ gaged Mann to collect debts owed by local farmers. The residents of Dedham recognized a rising legal talent when, in July 1826, they selected Mann to address their memorial service to honor the July 4 deaths of John Adams and Thomas Jefferson. This address firmly estab­
li hed his reputation as an orator and was probably influential in his subsequent election to the Massachusetts General Court (the state legislature) in 1827.

Mann’s Political Career

Mann’s career in the Massachusetts legislature continued until 1837, during which time he continued to reflect the changes in his society. His first legislative speech came during a debate on a petition by the First Religious Society of Blandford for incorporation. Mann opposed granting this Congregationalist group perpetual control over its endowment, resting his argument on the princi­lple of religious freedom. The defeat of the petition strengthened the Unitarians in their struggle with the Congregationalists.

Mann’s second speech was in favor of state support for the construction of a privately owned railroad. Here he displayed the reasoning he would use to support the development of industry in Massachusetts: such develop­ment had as its main objective the public good rather than private gain. In the decade of the 1830s, as the rail­ roads increasingly used public funding for private profit, his reasoning about the public good seemed less sustain­ able when applied to the railroads, for subsidies to the railroads benefited the rich more clearly than the public as a whole; nevertheless, he remained a staunch advocate of state support for them. During his initial support for the railroads in 1827, he demonstrated his clear under-· standing of the direction of economic development in the state as he provided statistics to support his con­tention that the state’s future was not in agriculture but in commerce and manufacturing. As his biographer put it, “Mann placed himself squarely in favor of industrial development, improved transportation, and the growth of towns and cities.”

Mann’s strong support for religious freedom was not the only indication that his legislative positions were in­ influenced by the ideas of the Enlightenment. As a legisla­tor he supported a number of humanitarian reforms, such as the overturning of the state ‘s debtor laws, hu­ mane treatment of the insane, and the temperance movement.

Mann’s concern for the treatment of the insane, who previously had been incarcerated in county and town jails, often in deplorable conditions, began developing in the late 1820s. In response to revelations about their plight, Mann delivered, in 1830, the first speech in the Massachusetts legislature supporting the construction and maintenance of a mental hospital by the state. His bill passed, and he was appointed one of three commis­sioners to oversee the construction and operation of the first state mental hospital in North America. Within three years, the Worcester State Lunatic Hospital re­ceived its first patients and a new era had begun in the treatment of the mentally ill.

Mann’s support of the temperance movement fol­ lowed a zigzag course. He first supported the conserva­tive temperance groups, which advocated moral persuasion in favor of moderation. Later, he lent his sup­ port to the radical temperance groups, which pushed for legislation to enforce their views. While this shift cer­tainly indicated a lessening of Mann’s faith in the rea­sonableness of his fellows, it was nevertheless based on the Enlightenment belief that the state had the duty to protect social and economic harmony and the integrity of the electoral process. The presence of intemperate in­dividuals, he believed, threatened this harmony and in­ integrity. A reliance on the coercive power of the state to ensure social or individual benefits, even when it meant that individuals were to be controlled for their own good, was always implicit and often explicit in Enlight­enment thought. Yet it also challenged the classical lib­eral distrust of government authority, a distrust expressed in the Jeffersonian dictum “That government governs best which governs least.”

The two reform movements which did not find Horace their ranks during the early 1830s were public education and abolition. His position on the abolition of slavery displayed the conflict between his moral beliefs, his economic and political commitments, and his sense of political reality. Mann considered slavery to be a moral abomination that re­ quired eventual eradication. The abolitionists, however, with their demands for the immediate end of slavery, seemed to him to be threatening not only the political stability of the republic but the institution of private property. Moreover, he demands and moral stridency only strengthened the slave states’ re­ solve to defend their “peculiar” institution, thus delaying a peaceful resolution of the problem. The abolitionists’ goals could be achieved, he felt, only by force of arms, and such a course would threaten the republic. Addi­tionally, even if freedom could be peacefully won, it was not clear to Mann what could be done with the freed African-Americans.

As Jefferson once wrote, Mann thought that the African-American’s future was not in America, but he was not sanguine about African recolonization. Interestingly, when it came to cases of individual African-Americans, Mann was egalitarian and sympathetic, often at a great per­sonal cost. In 1844, for example, he canceled his sched­uled speech before the New Bedford Lyceum when he learned that it restricted membership to whites. Three years later, when a black woman, Chloe Lee, was admitted to the State Normal School at West Newton and could not find accommodations among the townspeople, she was welcomed into the Mann home. It appears that espe­cially during the years when he was Secretary to the State Board of Education, his concern for preserving social har­mony led him to silence his support for the abolitionist cause. Later, however, as a member of the U.S. House of Representatives, filling the seat of recently deceased John Quincy Adams, he delivered a memorable antislavery speech in opposition to the Compromise Bill of 1850, a speech which nearly cost him his House seat in the next election and was a major factor in his defeat in the subse­quent one.

While the abolitionists and slavery caused Mann con­siderable concern during his legislative career, educa­tional questions were not on his agenda. It was not until 1837 that his attention focused on public education. By then much of the groundwork for educational reform in Massachusetts had been already done by others. When Mann did enter the fray, however, he left a lasting mark on American education. The issue which directed Mann’s interest to education was the dispersal of funds which had been allocated to the state by the federal gov­ernment to compensate for the Massachusetts state mili­ tia’s service during the War of 1812. Mann supported the use of these monies for the state’s common schools. Although he lost the fiscal battle, the legislature created a state board of education authorized to collect and dis­ seminate information about schools to the local districts and the public at large. Much to the surprise of his con­ temporaries, Mann accepted the appointment as Secre­tary to the Board, a position he occupied from 1837 to 1848.

Mann resigned from the Secretary’s post in 1848 and was elected in 1848 and 1850 to the U.S. House of Rep­resentatives from the Eighth Congressional District. During his four years in Congress, sectional issues sur­ rounding the slavery question commanded most of his attention, and he gained national prominence for his an­tislavery position. His antislavery and temperance posi­ ions were the major factors in his defeat for reelection in 1852.

Soon after that electoral defeat, Mann accepted the presidency of the yet-to-be-established Antioch College in Ohio. In the last stage of his career, he continued to re­flect the mood of his times. He turned to higher education as the nation began to focus attention on that area. He moved west to Yellow Springs, Ohio, and thus be-
came part of the great westward migration from the Northeast. One of Mann’s prime presidential concerns was the higher education of women. Shortly after the women’s suffrage movement was launched, in July 1848 at Seneca Falls, New York, he was attempting to provide women with the same collegiate education that male students received. To this end, he expanded the develop­ment begun earlier at Oberlin. Antioch College was open to men and women of all races, and no distinction was made for race or gender in curricular questions, al­ though he was known to have some vocal reservations about absolute social equality among men and women. By the time he died in 1859 at Yellow Springs, his life re­flected nearly all the important intellectual, social, polit­ical, and economic developments of his time.

Mann and the Common Schools

Mann’s most far-reaching contributions to education were made during the years he spent as secretary to the Massachusetts State Board of Education, 1837 to 1848. He had been at the pinnacle of his political career when he accepted Governor Everett’s offer to quit the state Senate and direct the state’s efforts to reform public ed­ucation. The importance he assigned to the task was ev­ ident when he wrote to a friend, “My lawbooks are for sale. My office is ‘to let’! The bar is no longer my forum. My jurisdiction is changed. I have abandoned jurispru­dence, and betaken myself to the larger sphere of mind and morals.”17 Although he had grown somewhat disil­lusioned with the possibility of voluntary reform in adults, his pessimism did not extend to the young. He explained his optimism by saying, “Having found the present generation composed of materials almost un­ malleable, I am transferring my efforts to the next. Men are cast iron, but children are wax. Strength expended
upon the latter may be effectual, which will make no impression on the former.

The Massachusetts State Board of Education held its first meeting on June 29, 1837, and formally elected Mann as its Secretary. The duties of the Board were closely circumscribed by the law which had created it; two of its duties were to present to the legislature an an­nual abstract of the school reports received by its Secre­tary and to report to the legislature all its activities, its reflections on the condition of education in the state, and any recommendations it might have for improve­ment of that condition. 19 The Secretary’s duties were similarly specifically prescribed: the Secretary “shall, un­ der the direction of the board, collect information of the actual conditions and efficiency of the common schools and other means of popular education; and diffuse as widely as possible throughout every part of the Com­monwealth, information of the most approved and suc­cessful methods of arranging the studies and conducting the education of the young, to the end that all children in this Commonwealth, who depend upon common schools for instruction, may have the best education which those schools can be made to impart.” 20 While these duties were clearly prescribed, the means for ef­fecting them were not. Moreover, the powers of the Board and its Secretary were limited to the collection and dissemination of information.

Regardless of their reform preferences, the only op­tion open to Mann and the Board was to seek voluntary cooperation from local districts. To effect educational re­ form, Mann proceeded to demonstrate the power of in­ formation when systematically disseminated through an official government office. Initially, Mann’s most effec­tive device for conveying information to the people of the state was the county educational convention. During the first year, he held an advertised meeting in every county of the state where he presented educational questions to the local citizens. A wide range of educational topics was discussed, including teaching methods, the most appropriate location of schools, school apparatus, texts, discipline, the duties of local school board mem­bers, attendance problems, finance, and European edu­cational innovations. Mann took particular pains to ensure the attendance of local dignitaries who were known friends of education.

A second method of disseminating information was through the annual reports of the Board and the Secre­tary, which were sent to all district school boards as well as to the state legislature and the governor. Educational officials throughout the nation obtained copies of these reports, thus adding to the national influence of school reforms in Massachusetts. In addition, Mann established the semimonthly Common School Journal in 1839, which published articles and news items about educa­tion and was available to most teachers in the state.

Among the wide variety of educational topics, ad­dressed by Mann during his tenure as Secretary, perhaps the most significant were school buildings, moral values, the example of Prussian education, discipline, teachers, and the economic value of education. The question of curriculum subject matter was not one of the most im­portant issues for Mann, perhaps because the curriculum was mandated by state legislation. He addressed this question only once, in his Sixth Annual Report, for the year 1842, where he noted that the law required instruc­tion in “orthography, reading, writing, English gram­mar, geography, and arithmetic.” Mann further explained that these were “the minimum but not the maximum.”  He then spent the remaining 110 pages presenting a detailed plan for studying physiology, a sub­ject that he felt was wrongly neglected. Generally, how­ ever, when he dealt with curricular subjects, he approached the topic from the perspective of teaching methods rather than as subject matter. The six issues which the Secretary seemed to find most central to his reform efforts will now be examined.

School Buildings

Under the general heading of school buildings, Mann included a variety of items that involved the physical set­ ting of schooling. One of his less acclaimed accomplishments, from which generations of schoolchildren benefited, was the vastly improved physical setting of school life. The idyllic “little red schoolhouses” nestled under giant oak trees beside babbling brooks and sur­ rounded with green meadows were usually fictional cre­ations of writers who romanticized the American educational past. Such scenes definitely did not describe the reality of most district schools in the late 1830s. Most were poorly constructed, offering little protection from the cold winters. Few had adequate windows or ar­tificial means to provide sufficient light. Rare was the school large enough to accommodate its students. Many provided only backless benches, which were not only un­ comfortable but dangerous. Frequently, schools were without toilet facilities and water for drinking and wash­ ing. Many schools were located in unattractive, and sometimes unhealthful, sites apparently chosen because they were unsuitable for any other productive use.

The Secretary marshaled the power of “information” to combat these conditions. In the first Annual Report the Board, under the subject of important topics, listed “the proper and commodious construction of school­ houses.” In the Secretary’s section of the same report, he stated, “There are four cardinal topics First in order is the situation, construction, and the number of the school­ houses.” The circular Mann sent to each county in 1837 to advertise his county educational conventions listed 11 questions “to direct attention to some leading considerations”: the first was, “Is inconvenience or dis­ comfort suffered from the construction or location of School Houses in your Town, and if so in what man­ner? The following year Mann praised the city of Salem’s improvements in seating, ventilation, and recon­struction of its school as a carrot to tempt other districts to follow suit. Lest the recalcitrant miss the point, he warned,
In many other places, improvements of the same kind have been made, though to a less extent, and in a part only of the houses. It would be a great mistake, however, to sup­pose, that nothing remains to be done in this important de­partment of the system of public instruction. The cases mentioned are the slightest exceptions, compared with the generality of the neglect The children must continue to breathe poisonous air, and sit upon sears threatening structural derangement, until parents become satisfied, chat a little money may well be expended to secure to their offspring, the blessings of sound health, a good conforma­tion, and a strong, quick-working mind.
In his report three years later, Mann returned again to the question of school buildings as he expressed guarded optimism and satisfaction with the general progress around the state. He included, in the appendix, designs, and descriptions of the new buildings at Springfield, Lowell, and Salem. He suggested that other districts might “select any one of them as a model, or they may attempt a combination which will be an improvement upon all. These and others erected during the past year, are ornaments to the respective places of their location, an honor to their inhabitants and a pledge of the ele­vated character of their posterity.”26 Moreover, the Secretary’s annual publication of each town’s rank in school expenditure s caused some towns, such as Palmer, “mor­tification” and others, such as Lowell, an occasion to boast.27 It is not difficult to imagine the cumulative ef­fect of this kind of publicized information.

Moral Values

At the core of Mann’s effort to reform common school­ ing was his belief that the school must inculcate an ap­propriate set of moral values in the state’s children. This belief was not entirely an innovation in Mann’s time; schools in Massachusetts had traditionally been seen as institutions auxiliary to the home and the church in the inculcation of Puritan values in the young. What was new with Mann was the centrality of the school, the set of values to be inculcated, and the role of the state in determining and inculcating those values. Mann was par­ticularly concerned with the apparent breakdown of moral consensus and the resulting conflict in his society. The religious struggle between the Calvinists and more liberal sects, the economic strife between rich and poor, the riots pitting Irish immigrants against native work­ ers-all were evidence to Mann of a dangerous social disharmony which threatened the stability of society. The common school was to become the central institu­tion to ameliorate this situation. It was necessary for all children to develop a commitment to a common core of values. But not just any core of values would suffice. The necessary values were those which later social scientists would call modern values, that is, values which would support and sustain industrial development.

Mann called these values the “common element s” of the common school. They would include the “great Christian truths” which he believed all rational men would agree on. In one sense they were values based in religious belief, and as such, they represented a pan­ Protestant perspective which reinforced the liberal wing of New England Protestantism in direct opposition to traditional Calvinism. This raised the opposition of a minority of Congregationalist ministers, who remained committed to Calvinist dogma. The issue became galva­nized when the State Board began the practice of rec­ommending books which districts might purchase for school libraries. Led by Frederick Packard, the American Sunday School Union claimed, after some of its materi­als were rejected, that Mann was attempting to eliminate religion from the common schools.

It is significant that Mann received general support from Protestant ministers and even from an apparent ma­jority of Congregationalist ministers.28 Irish Catholics were later to object to the “common elements,” especially when they were accompanied with the reading of the King James version of the Bible. They rightly saw the common school as positioned against Catholicism, and eventually, they built a separate system of parochial schools. Thus, ironically, Mann ‘s effort to unify society around commonly held values led to a competing private school system with potentially conflicting values. That the Catholic schools did not promote the divisive values Mann feared from sectarian schooling is another irony which cannot be explored here.

The predominance of Christian religious sentiment in New England blinded Mann and the constituents to an important implication of the “common elements” he believed should be taught in the common schools. The issue was raised, however, by the Englishman John Stu­ art Mill, one of the most prominent philosophers of the 19th century. In the late 1840s, English public education was racked by religious conflict between Anglicans, var­ious dissenting Protestant sects, and Catholics. In an at­ tempt at compromise, educational reformers proposed a system of national education which would be “unsectar­ian” and would adopt a “common elements ” approach similar to Mann’s. In a speech prepared in 1849, Mill fired withering salvos at the basic principles of this pro­posal that were equally applicable to Mann’s program. Mill correctly noted that it was indeed religion which would be taught in the proposed public schools. And no matter how the final compromise among the competing Christian sects was effected, he argued, the resulting re­ religion of the public school would be some variant of Christianity. And what would this result mean? Mill pointed out to the proponents, “If you could carry all the sects with you by your compromise you would have effected nothing more but a compact among the more powerful bodies to cease fighting among themselves and join in trampling the weaker. You would have contrived a national education not for all, but for the believers in the New Testament. The Jew and the unbeliever would be excluded from it though they would not the less be required to pay for it… Religious exclusion and in­ equality are as odious when practiced against minorities as majorities.” Mill’s conclusion was unambiguously stated: “Education provided by the public must be an education for all, and to be an education for all it must be purely secular education.” 30 Mill’s logic escaped most New Englanders, but not all. (Orestes Brownson was an exception, as the reading at the end of this chapter shows.)

In a way, Frederick Packard’s criticism of Mann’s common elements was correct. When Packard argued that Mann wanted to take religion out of the common school, he understood religion to mean Calvinism. In­ deed, that and more was what Mann had in mind. Henceforth the public school would not contribute to the creation of Congregationalists, Unitarians, Baptists, or Methodists. Instead, it would attempt to create citi­zens committed to a secular faith whose moral values would play much the same role that doctrine had played in sectarian faith. In a figurative sense, the school would become the temple, the teacher, the minister, and the school boards the temple elders. American schoolchild­ren would be taught a pan-Protestant brand of citizen­ship which would wed religion and nationalism in “one nation under God,” as the Pledge of Allegiance would later put it. God, of course, was presumed to be the God of Protestantism. The principle was not new, for this idea had energized earlier Puritan education (and is reflected in the Benjamin Rush selection at the end of Chapter 2). What was new was the systemic government-supported scope of this approach. It would take a series of painful
U.S. Supreme Court decisions in the mid-20th century to eliminate religious references and rituals in schools, thus rectifying the Protestant precedent set by Mann in Massachusetts.

Lessons from the Prussian School System

Soon after he turned his attention to educational ques­tions, Mann began to read available commentaries on education. He was first introduced to Prussian schools by French educator Victor Cousin’s popular report of their successes.31 The Prussian system had been organized in the 1820s along with a model recommended by Jo­hann Fichte, a German philosopher, during the Napoleonic occupation of Prussia. Fichte’s proposals, in his Addresses to the German Nation, were designed to de­velop Prussian nationalism and a nation strong enough to unite the German states for world leadership. By the mid-1830s the Prussian experiment had excited educa­ tors in Western Europe and the United States.

The Prussians had developed a state-financed system which was free, universal, and compulsory through the elementary grades. The system was class-based and con­ sisted of two separate tiers of schooling. The tier for the aristocratic class had three levels, beginning with the vorschule. This elementary school, responsible for prepar­ ing upper-class youth for the gymnasium, was academi­cally oriented. The gymnasium provided a classical education closely akin to American and English collegiate educations. Graduates of the gymnasium might continue their higher education in either the military academies, designed to produce the future officers of the Prussian military or the universities. The university, as envisioned by Fichte and developed in 19th-century Germany, was primarily a research institution whose dual functions were to produce new knowledge and to educate the next generation of civic and religious leaders.
The tier for the common people had two levels. The elementary volkschule, or people’s school, was compul­sory. Its goal was to develop patriotic citizens, and its motto was “God, Emperor, and Country.” In addition to loyalty and obedience to authority, it taught basic literacy and numeracy. Most of the graduates of the volkschule went directly into the workforce. A few continued their training in either the technical schools, which produced technicians and middle-range managers for the Prussian economy, or the normal schools, which trained teachers for the volkschule. The curricular emphasis in the normal schools was on how to teach, that is, methods. It was deemed not only unnecessary but counterproductive for volkschule teachers to have knowledge or understanding much beyond that necessary for the volkschule. Loyalty and obedience, not the initiative or critical thinking, were the goals for the training of the common people. As Fichte had written on the education of the German child, “If you want to influence him at all, you must do more than merely talk to him. You must fashion him, and fashion him in such a way that he cannot will otherwise than you wish him to will.”

During the spring and summer of 1843, at his own expense, Mann traveled to Europe to examine its educa­tional systems firsthand. He was relatively unimpressed with the quality of education in England and France. The Prussian schools, however, made a distinctly posi­tive impression on him, and he devoted much of his 1843 Annual Report to enumerating their praises. More­ over, Mann continued to cite Prussian examples during the remainder of his tenure when he urged school re­form. The Secretary was not completely oblivious to the dangers inherent in using institutions designed for an authoritarian society as models for democracy, but he quickly dismissed chose dangers as inconsequential. He argued that education was a means which could be made to serve diametrically opposed ends. In summation, he said, “If Prussia can pervert the benign influences of education to the support of arbitrary power, we surely can use chem for support and perpetuation of republican institutions.”

The Prussian volkschule evoked Mann’s most enthusi­astic responses. The idea of a free, state-financed and state-controlled universal and compulsory school which would affect all of the young was its most obvious at­ traction. He seemed to ignore the class separation into volkschule and vorschule. This is surprising since he waged unending war against private schools for the wealthy in Massachusetts. These schools, he argued, not only would encourage class distinctions and thus class hatred but would siphon off the interest and support of the best elements of society from the common schools to the private schools attended by their children.

His second observation about the volkschule was the joy of learning which it engendered among the students. The Secretary was fond of noting that during his extensive vis­its to the Prussian schools, he “never saw one child in tears.” This he claimed was due to the absence of corpo­ral punishment and the superior methods of the teachers.
The superiority of Prussian teachers was not acciden­tal, according to Mann. Rather, it was the direct result of their superior training. The Prussians had developed nor­mal schools for the training of its volkschule teachers. In the normal schools, the teachers were carefully schooled in
pedagogy and the subjects taught in the volkschule. The apparent success of these institutions reinforced Mann’s commitment to the state normal schools he had been struggling to secure in Massachusetts.

The Prussian School System in the Mid-19th Century

School Discipline

The problems surrounding discipline in the schools con­cerned Mann throughout his tenure as secretary. His ap­proach to discipline reveals much about his educational beliefs and their relation to his broader social and polit­ical philosophies. He discussed disciplinary issues in sev­eral of his Annual Reports and speeches. One speech, “On School Punishments,” first delivered in Boston in 1839, revised in 1845, and included in his Lectures on Education published in 1854, succinctly summarized his general position.

One of Mann’s most enduring legacies was to help replace the Calvinist view that children, being naturally depraved at birth, must have the ” devil beaten out of them.”

Mann began the speech with the assertion, “Punishment, when taken by itself, is always to be considered as an evil “an evil, however, which may be used as a last re­ sort, as a doctor uses poison to arrest a disease so that it may be treated. By punishment, Mann meant physical beatings or harsh words. Such treatment, he asserted, al­ ways caused fear in the child, “and fear is a most debasing, dementalizing passion.” He contended that fear cor­rupted not only the intellect but also the personality and morality of the child. Moreover, if the teacher is to control the moral, social, and intellectual development of the child, she must know the child, that is, have access to the child’s inner self. But “the moment a child’s mind is strongly affected by fear, it flies instinctively away and hides itself in the deepest recesses it can find . . . Instead of exhibiting to you his whole consciousness, he conceals from you as much as he can. , , . your communication with that child’s heart is at an end.”37 In this discussion Mann exhibited insights into the nature of social psychology and the potential for manipulation of the psyche through affection, which was not generally understood until the end of his century, It would be left to the 20th-century progressive educational theorists (as discussed in Chapter
4) to further develop this approach to pedagogy-an ap­proach which is both more humane and potentially more manipulative than a pedagogy of overt authoritarianism.

The common use of corporal punishment in New England had been inspired by Calvinist beliefs in the de­pravity of human nature, which led adults to think it necessary to “beat the devil out of children.” In sharp contrast, Mann’s conception of human nature was grounded in Enlightenment and Unitarian beliefs. He, therefore, saw the child as a rational being more appro­priately approached through intelligence and love. The good teacher, “singularly gifted with talent and resources, and with the divine quality of love, … can win the affection, and, by controlling the heart, can control the conduct of children . . . ” As a realist and a shrewd social observer, Mann understood that such an approach required two conditions: first, children who had been reared in homes where love, reason, and sound moral values predominated , and second, teachers who had been adequately prepared to understand the child, class­ room management, and the subject matter. Neither of these conditions was universally present in Mann’s Massachusetts. When teachers were not capable of more en­ lightened methods or students were incorrigible because of bad home conditions, Mann believed the punishment was the only alternative in order to “save” young delin­quents from a life of immorality, dissipation, or crime. The teacher or parent should always consider whether the evil to be cured was sufficiently greater than the evil of punishment. Mann went on to describe how and when, as a last resort, the punishment should be used to pre­ vent greater evils. He challenged teachers to constantly try to decrease their use of punishment, with the goal of eliminating it completely from the common school. Thus he effectively presented punishment as an accept­ able alternative for teachers who were not yet fully ade­ quate but who, as they became more proficient in their profession, would obviously resort less often to punish­ment. The good teacher would understand, according to the Secretary, that “a child may surrender to fear, with­ out surrendering to principle. But it is the surrender to principle only which has any permanent value.”

In his Eighth Annual Report, Mann clearly indicated the relation between his ideas on discipline and his so­ciopolitical ideals. In the 1840s the number of schools which were closed before the end of the term because teachers could not maintain the order necessary to con­ duct them was decreasing significantly, while the total number of schools was increasing. But this progress was not sufficient for Mann. He explained that one of the most important goals of schooling was “training our children in self-government.” He proclaimed, “So tremendous, too, are the evils of anarchy and lawless­ ness, that a government by mere force, however arbitrary and cruel, has been held preferable to no-government. But self-government, self-control, a voluntary compli­ ance with the laws of reason and duty, have been justly considered as the highest point of excellence attainable by a human being.” He went on to argue that self­ government required a rational understanding of the rules and laws. This understanding could not come through fear inspired by punishment. Mann informed teachers that it was a teacher’s duty to prevent “violations” of moral law “by rectifying that state of mind out of which violations come. Nor is it enough that the law be obeyed. As far as possible, he is to see it is obeyed from right mo­tives. As a moral act blind obedience is without value. As a moral act, also, obedience through fear is without value; not only so, but as soon as the fear is removed, the restrained impulses will break out and demand the ar­ rears of indulgence as a long-delayed debt.” 40 Mann left no room for doubt that he believed the implications of his notions of discipline and self-government extended beyond the school and childhood. He explicitly noted they have “extraordinary force, in view of our political institutions, founded as they are upon the great idea of the capacity of man for self-government.”

The Quality of Teachers

The importance of the teaching corps to Mann’s educa­tional reforms, while implicit in nearly all his work, was nowhere more explicit and obvious than in his discus­sions of school discipline. Both the Board and the Secre­tary noted their concern with the education and 1ua1ity of the state’s teachers in their First Annual Report 2 and continued to address the issue in each subsequent Report during Mann’s 12-year tenure. Mann correctly under­ stood that fundamental to the problems which he and others observed with common-school teachers was the inadequate preparation most teachers had received. Many teachers had not attended any institution of higher education. Some had graduated from or at least attended an academy or college, but for most of them, teaching was a way station en route to a more attractive profession. While some academies had courses in pedagogy, there were few academies or colleges where one could find a full teacher-education program. In March 1838 Edmund Dwight, a member of the original Board of Education, offered to provide $10,000 to help finance a state teachers’ training institute if the state legislature would appropriate a similar sum from state funds. By the end of the summer, a bill appropriating the necessary funds had been hurried through the legislature and signed by Governor Everett. A major new develop­ment in the history of American education was about to begin.

Normal Schools

The first consideration involved the nature of teacher training. The response to this need by Mann and the Board defined teacher education for the subsequent century. The agenda they set resulted in both the best and the worst of what was to occur in American teacher education. Their fundamental princi­ple was that common-school teachers needed special preparation to comprehend the nature of learners, the learning process, the subjects of the common-school curriculum, and how to teach. The last element included organization of the curricular materials, classroom or­ganization, and discipline, as well as pedagogical meth­ ods. These understandings, Mann argued, did not develop spontaneously and were not being adequately addressed in the available institutions of higher educa­tion: the colleges and academies.
Rather than encouraging the incorporation of teacher education into existing institutions, Mann opted for new institutions which would be different and separate from the old. Moreover, the new normal schools were developed on the Prussian normal-school model, where pedagogical methods not only were in­cluded in the curriculum but dominated it. Addition­ ally, he insisted that the “academic” portion of the curriculum be limited to the subjects taught in the common schools. The experiment began July 3, 1839, with the opening of the state normal school for women at Lexington, which was followed by the es­ establishment of a coeducational normal school at Barre in September of that year. By the end of his tenure, Mann would see the opening of three additional nor­ mal schools in Massachusetts.
These schools would provide the nation with a model whose strength resided in the recognition of the need for special preparation for teachers. However, the model contained weaknesses which would plague teacher edu­ cation to the present day. The isolation of teacher edu­cation from the rest of higher education and the accompanying denigration of academic subjects pro­duced teachers whose subject-matter knowledge seemed confined to what was taught in elementary schools. This emphasis resulted in methods-trained teachers who knew how to teach but were less acquainted with what should be taught or why–matters they were not expected to decide upon anyway. In short, the normal­ school approach was to train technicians but not to educate scholars, and it might be argued that teacher ed­ucation has yet to recover from this original deficit.

Teachers as Exemplars

The lack of adequate preparation was not the only problem which Mann placed under the category of teacher quality. He was equally concerned that the teacher should be a model for students to emulate during their formative years.
Like countless predecessors from Isocrates in Greece to Quintillian in Rome to De Feltre in Renaissance Italy, Mann emphasized the importance of the moral charac­ter of the teacher. In his Fourth Annual Report, he ad­ monished that local school committees “are sentinels stationed at the door of every schoolhouse in the State, to see that no teacher ever crosses its threshold, who is not clothed, from the crown of his head to the sole of his foot, in garments of virtue.” He then noted strong concurrence from these committees: “as a single voice coming from a single heart-they urge, they insist, they demand, that the great axioms of a Christian morality shall be sedulously taught and that the teachers shall themselves be patterns of the virtues, they are required to inculcate.”4 This notion of the teacher as a model of Protestant virtue led to an unprecedented invasion of the private lives of American teachers during Mann’s time, a scrutiny that even today separates teachers from other professionals.

Feminization of Teaching

The third aspect of Mann’s concerns involved gender. During his tenure, the number and percentage of female teachers increased so dramatically that it is fair to say that by the end of the 1840s common-school teaching was viewed as a femi­ nine occupation. This was a development Mann cham­ pioned. In the 18th century, common-school teachers were almost universally males. Late in that century girls began to attend common schools during the summer terms, when the boys were in the fields helping with farm duties. At that time New England communities be­ gan to employ female teachers for the summer terms. Eventually, some females were employed to teach during the winter terms, especially when it was difficult to find male teachers and also because female teachers were much less expensive. Mann noted in the First Annual Re­port chat the average wage of female teachers was about one-third that of male teachers. The average cost of a male teacher continued to be between two and one-half and three times chat of a female teacher during his tenure. While Mann cautioned that the differential was neither just nor wise, the repeated publication of the differential in his Reports may have had the effect of in­ creasing the attractiveness of employing female teachers because of their lower salary.

If the cost of female teachers was one factor in the feminization of teaching, a second impetus was Mann’s arguments, which at least legitimated the trend and thus made it easier for school committees to justify hiring fe­ male teachers. He began his campaign for female teach­ ers with a speech he delivered to the educational conventions of each county in the state during 1838. The Secretary forecast that the time was imminent when all would agree in “regarding female as superior to male teaching for the young children.” After explaining the wastage of a “vast amount of female talent,” Mann posed this rhetorical question:

Is there not an obvious, constitutional difference of temperament between the sexes, indicative of a pre­arranged fitness and adaptation, and making known to us, as by a heaven-imparted sign, that woman, by her livelier sensibility and her quicker sympathies, is the forechosen guide and guardian of children of a tender age?

In subsequent Annual Reports, he spelled out what he meant by temperament, fitness, sensibility, and sympa­thies. The basic contention was that a man was prone to be more rational than emotional or loving; thus male teachers would demand justice as a reaction to offenses. In contrast, the predominant female characteristic was affection rather than reason. Women would naturally love children rather than seek vengeance or justice for children’s transgressions. This “natural” condition of women made them better equipped to be teachers, according to Mann, because their loving discipline would provide them easier access to the inner psyche of the students.48 The short- or intermediate-term effect o the acceptance of the secretary’s position was to open an important occupation to women. The long-term effect. however, was to reinforce the sexist belief that women were by nature not only fundamentally different from men but deficient in rational facilities.

Whatever the effect of Mann’s campaign for female teachers, during his tenure as secretary the number of female teachers increased dramatically. Between 1837 and 1848 the increase of female teachers was 35 times as great as that of males. Moreover, in each of the years from 1845 to 1848, the number of male teachers actually declined. By 1848 females accounted for 68 percent of all common-school teachers in Massachusetts4.9 The secretary reported Massachusetts as leading all states in the employment of female teachers but predicted that as soon as other states provided normal schools to prepare women they would follow the Massachusetts example. 50 In this prediction he was correct. From this time on, one would speak of “schoolmarms” rather than “schoolmas­ters,” and the pronoun “she” would be generally accurate when referring to teachers.

The Economic Value of Schooling

During the 1840s Horace Mann developed a set of ar­guments which rallied the citizenry of the state to the banner of mass schooling. This was the first prominent American statement of what social scientists in the 20th century would name the “human capital theory” and for which they could claim originality. 2 The Secretary’s ar­ arguments were persuasive because of the different mes­ sages they carried to various segments of his constituency. To the worker, the message was: Send your children to school so they may become rich. Employers were advised that the common schools would provide them with workers who were not only more productive but also docile, easily managed, and unlikely to resort to strikes or violence. All segments of society could respond to the notion that schools would actually create wealth, thus relieving the plight of the poor without cost to the more affluent.

The Fifth Annual Report includes a major section de­ voted to the results of Mann’s inquiry into “the effect of education upon the worldly fortunes or estates of men­ its influence upon property, upon human comfort and competence, upon the outward, visible material interests or well-being of individuals and communities.” 53 This he considered not the highest but the lowest of the beneficent influences of education. Nevertheless, he argued that material well-being was the prerequisite for the higher influences; moreover, if we take his rank-ordering at face value, it is ironic that his economic justification for schooling was to become the most enduring aspect of his educational thought. It continued to dominate educa­tional discussion in the 20th century.

Mann’s 1841 study centered on evidence solicited from “practical, sagacious and intelligent businessmen” who had employed large numbers of workers. The object was “to ascertain the difference in productive ability­ where natural capacities have been equal-between the educated and the uneducated.” The results of this
early version of survey research showed, according to the secretary,

“a most astonishing superiority in productive power, on the part of the educated over the uneducated laborer. The hand is found to be another hand when guided by an in­telligent mind, processes are performed, not only more rapidly, but better, when facilities which have been exer­cised early in life, furnish their assistance. Individuals who, without the aid of knowledge, would have been con­demned to perpetual inferiority of condition, and sub­jected to all the evils of want and poverty, rise to competence and independence, by the uplifting power of education … those who have been blessed with good common school education, rise to a higher and higher point, in the kinds of labor performed, and also in the rate of wages paid, while the ignorant sink like dregs and are al­ ways found at the bottom.”

Secretary Mann included several specimen responses from businessmen in the Report to substantiate his conclusions about the productive consequences of education. A few excerpts from the letter of. Barlett, Esq., a Lowell man­ufacturer who had employed between 400 and 900 per­sons during the previous 10 years, is instructive:

I have no hesitation in affirming that I have found the best educated to be the most profitable help . . . They make the best wages They have more order, and sys­tem; they not only keep their persons neater, but their machinery is in better condition. . . .

I have never considered mere knowledge, valuable as it is in itself to the laborer, as the only advantage derived from a good Common School education. I have uniformly found the better educated as a class possessing a higher and better state of morals, more orderly and respectful in their deport­ment, and more ready to comply with the wholesome and necessary regulations of the establishment, and in times of agitation, on account of some change in regulations or wages, I have always looked to the most intelligent, best ed­ucated and the most moral for support, and have seldom been disappointed….

The owners of manufacturing property have a deep pe­cumary interest in the education and morals of their help.

In his farewell Twelfth Annual Report, the Secretary again returned to this theme in a section entitled “Intel­lectual Education as a Means of Removing Poverty and Securing Abundance.”57 He began with the claim that industrial and business operations had exposed Massa­chusetts “to the fatal extremes of wealth and poverty.”58 The specter of a European type of class division could best be avoided, according to Mann, by upgrading the lower orders through education. With the enormous confidence of the Enlightenment, he proclaimed that

Education, then, beyond all other devices of human origin, is the great equalizer of the conditions of men- the balance wheel of the social machinery. . . It does better than disarm the poor of their hostilities towards the rich; it prevents being poor.

With a broadside aimed at revolutionary ideas, Mann argued his belief that the long-term economic benefits of education were far superior to short-term social up­heaval designed to rectify perceived social inequities or injustices:

The main idea set forth in the creeds of some political reformers, or revolutionizers, is, chat some people are poor because others are rich. This idea supposes a fixed amount of property in the community, which, by fraud, or force, or arbitrary law is unequally divided among men; and the problem presented for solution is, how to transfer from those who are supposed to have too much, to those who feel and know chat they have too little. At this point, both their theory and their expected reform stop. But the benef­icent power of education would not be exhausted, even though it should peaceably abolish all the miseries that spring from the coexistence, side by side, of enormous wealth and squalid wane. It has a higher function. Beyond the power of diffusing old wealth, it has the prerogative of creating new . . . education creates or develops new trea­sures not before possessed or dreamed of by anyone.

A few pages later Mann summarized these ideas in two sentences which have a familiar ring for anyone acquainted with the writings of subsequent human capital theorists or educators for whom economic justification for education is paramount. The first: “For the creation of wealth then-for the existence of a wealthy people and a wealthy nation- intelligence is the grand condition.” And the second: “The greatest of all arts in political economy is, to change a consumer into a producer; and the next greatest is, to increase the producer’s producing power; -an end to be directly attained, by increasing his intelligence. ”

Subsequently, Mann provided several pages of examples of how increased intelligence in artisan workers might result in their developing more ingenious labor-saving techniques, thus increasing the productive capacity of al workers intelligent enough to use the innovations.

Two aspects of Mann’s contribution to the theory of human capital should be noted. First, his ideas must be placed within their ideological tradition. Mann wrote in the warm afterglow of the European Enlightenment and under the influence of classical liberal ideology. This tra­dition places ultimate faith in the human capacity to de­velop rational ability to solve all problems. This belief reinforced a set of psychological concepts of long stand­ing in Western history which have become known as fac­ulty psychology.

Faculty psychology was built on the notion that individuals learn best by vigorously exercising their mental faculties (e.g., memory, rea­son, precision) on difficult learning tasks and the ideas of great thinkers. They are then ready to apply, or “trans­fer,” their strengthened mental faculties to other learn­ ing and to real problems.

Second, and somewhat contradictorily, Mann’s busi­ness person supporters failed to link a common-school education with the application of creative intelligence in workers. As Maris A. Vinovskis has shown, “Although each of the respondents to Mann’s survey mentioned the ability of educated workers to work more efficiently than others, none of chem emphasized the importance of the ‘inventiveness’ which Mann stressed through the Fifth Annual Report. Instead, they tended to concentrate on the fact that these workers were able to follow directions better, were more punctual and reliable, and less likely to be unreasonable during periods of labor turmoil.”  The traits emphasized by the industrialists were elements of what was then called “industrial morality” and is cur­rently called “modern” (as opposed to “traditional”) cul­tural commitments. While Mann was emphasizing the intellectual results of common schooling, his industrial supporters were emphasizing the enculturation of a value system amenable to industrialized factory life.

Opposition to Mann’s Common-School Reforms

The Secretary’s attempts to reform the common schools of Massachusetts did not go unchallenged. The opposi­tion, inspired by different issues, came from three groups. The first conflict centered on Mann’s efforts to make the common schools non-denominational. As we have seen, the conservative Calvinists led by Frederick A. Packard lose this battle in the early 1840s. The second, more parochial conflict resulted from the offense taken by the Boston schoolmasters to Mann’s Seventh Annual Report. They believed chat Mann’s criticism of teaching methods, especially recitation and corporal punishment, had been directed at them. In response, they published Remarks on the Seventh Annual Report of the Hon. Horace M ann, which challenged his pedagogic positions. Af­ter a war of words, the Boston schoolmasters attempted to rally the state’s teachers against Mann by founding a state teachers’ association, which they hoped would con­demn Mann’s policies. This tactic was generally unsuc­cessful, as Mann’s supporters soon gained control of the organization.

The third group in opposition to Mann’s reforms was more broadly based and was concerned with the ideo­ logical and political implications of his approach. Mann was a member of the Whig party, which had created the state School Board and sponsored Mann’s ideas in state government. The Democrats, led by Marcus Morton, had generally opposed his measures. A leading public spokesman for the Democratic position was Orestes Brownson, who had undergone a religious transforma­tion similar to Mann’s. Brownson moved from the Calvinism of his youth to Presbyterianism and then to Unitarianism by the early 1830s. In 1838 he became ed­itor of a leading Democratic publication, the Boston Quarterly Review, and in that journal he launched his at­ tacks on Mann’s reforms. In an 1839 article, “Education of the People,” Brownson lashed out at the state board for proposing a system which would be used for politi­ cal domination of the people. He singled out the estab­lishment of normal schools as particularly offensive.

“The most we can hope from them is some little aid to teachers in the methods of teaching.” But more importantly, he argued, they were potentially dangerous to a free society. Based on the Prussian model, these normal schools, he believed, would produce conservative teach­ ers who would, in turn, impart Whig values to the chil­dren of the state. Moreover, Brownson asserted, the Board was attempting to influence the books placed in school libraries. The result of teachers’ imparting Whig philosophy and controlling schoolbooks would be “to give Whiggism a self-perpetuating power.”

Underlying Brownson’s opposition was his commitment to democratic localism, a belief that most governing and decision-making powers should be kept at the local level, in the hands of the people. He saw the common ­ school reforms as centralizing power at the state level, thus taking decisions out of popular control. Two years later Brownson elaborated his critique of State Board- sanctioned books for school libraries: “We object also to the sanction of the Board because it is an approach to a censorship of the press.” Then, as if able to foresee the events of the 20th-century publishing world, he declared, “The publishers will not dare insert in their series a book not sanctioned by the Board, however, valu­able it may be in itself, or however acceptable it would be to a large number of school districts; and the author will not dare pour out his whole thought, but only such a portion of it as he has reason to believe the Board will not refuse to sanction.”69 Brownson’s estimation of the Board of Education’s goals for the common schools was summed up in the 1838 article when he claimed:

In the view of this respectable Board, education is merely a branch of general police, the schoolmasters are only a better sort of constables. The Board would promote education, they would even make it universal because they esteem it the most effectual means possible of checking pauperism and crime, and making the rich secure in their possessions. Education has, therefore, a certain utility which may be told in solid cash saved to the Co mmon­ wealth. This being the leading idea, the most comprehen­sive view which the Board seems to take of education, what more should be expected of their labors, than such modifications and improvements as will render it more efficient as an arm of general police?

It is difficult to ascertain the effect Brownson’s attack had on the general populace of Massachusetts, but in the elections of 1839 the Democratic candidate for gover­ nor, Marcus Morton, won the statehouse after 12 previ­ ous unsuccessful attempts. In the spring of 1840, the legislature narrowly defeated a report of the Democratic­ controlled Education Committee which condemned both the State Board of Education and the new normal schools. The vote was 245 to 182.71 Although this vote did not end the attacks on Mann’s reform efforts, by the mid-1840s he had prevailed over all opposition, and his reforms were well on the way to becoming institutional­ized (see Exhibit 3.1).

Accounting for the Success of the Common-School Reforms

Why were Mann’s common-school reforms so success­ful? The answer is more complex than most historical ac­ counts suggest. The first and perhaps most important reason was that the Secretary was able to enlist the sup­ port of diverse elements in Massachusetts for his pro­ grams. One element of the supporting coalition was wealth. No reform movement in American history has had long-term success without forging an alliance with the money interests. Mann was successful, in part, be- use the mercantile, banking, and manufacturing inter­ests were convinced that his common-school reforms would provide long-term benefits for them. Moreover, he seemed to convince many working people that the common school would provide a better education than, was previously available. Additionally, his suggestion that common-school education was the vehicle to up­ ward economic mobility was attractive to some less­ than-affluent parents. Secondly, he gained the support of most of the religious (Protestant) communities because his “common elements,” while not all that each group desired, represented a compromise which was the most they could realistically expect. Finally, the common school and the slogans which carried its programs into the public discussion embodied the controlling classical liberal ideology of the age and thus successfully captured the popular imagination.

Horace Mann was the consummate educational salesman. He was not an innovator of educational, so­cial, or cultural ideas; most of his proposals for educa­tional reform were already current when he burst upon the educational scene. Onto existing educational prac­ tices and structures he grafted materials, ideas, and insti­tutions borrowed from European (especially German) and American educators. The extent to which many of Mann’s ideas were already conventional wisdom, al­ though not yet institutionalized, in New England can be seen in the 1829 edition of Hall’s Lectures on School­ Keeping. Samuel Read Hall was a New Englander, born a generation before Mann, who had devoted much, of his life to education. He had been a schoolteacher and one of the early innovators of teacher education in pri­vate normal schools and academies. His 1829 Lectures was both a summation of his educational thought and one of the first American texts on how to teach. In it, he discussed nearly every aspect of what Mann was later to incorporate into his reform efforts. Hall’s discussion of the need for the special preparation of teachers, teaching methods, discipline, school facilities, the evils of private schools, and the teacher as moral model could have been substituted for Mann’s discussions of these topics in his Annual Report or his Lectures on Education, and the reader would have hardly noticed the difference. That Horace Mann was not an innovator is not to his dis­ credit. His significance was due to his ability to recognize the innovations of others, blend them into coherent programs for reform, and sell that reform package to an attentive audience by appealing to dominant ideological precepts under particular political-economic condi­tions. In this, he was successful to a historic degree.

Lessons from Horace Mann’s Common­ School Reforms
It seems that every item of Horace Mann’s common­ school reforms, with the possible exception of his cam­paign to improve the physical conditions of schools and school equipment, can be viewed as containing both positive and negative elements. Any fair evalua­tion of his efforts, as well as an attempt to draw lessons from them, must address both aspects. His insistence on the teaching of the “common elements” of the great Christian truths to inculcate a common set of moral values not only helped stem the sectarian bickering among the major Protestant groups but provided soci­ ety with a potentially unifying value system to replace the outworn Calvinist doctrine. Did this contribution, however, outweigh the potential loss of a truly pluralis­ tic society where all individuals were freer to choose values compatible with their own cultural and class histories and characteristics? Did the Prussian model of universal state-supported and state-controlled education and improved pedagogical methods bring with it the anti-democratic impulses inherent in the despotic system of government it was designed to en­ hance? Mann’s condemnation of punishment meant that the practitioners of child beating in schools would be on the defensive. But what would counter the po­tential dangers of psychological manipulation inherent in his “loving” pedagogy? Were Mann’s contributions to the gains achieved by women in the teaching field adequate to offset the belief, made explicit in his argu­ments, that women are less rational than men? While the normal schools certainly represented a recognition that teachers needed education, was the pedagogically oriented education which they established as the norm for succeeding generations of teachers adequate? Mann’s use of arguments asserting the economic value of schooling surely increased the popularity of school­ ing among nearly all segments of society, but should economic motives be the driving force behind educa­tion? Such questions require students of education to examine their own fundamental beliefs and values regarding human nature, the good society, and the appropriate relationship of the individual to that society­ as well as their conception of the learning process and the teacher’s role in that process. Such questions are in­herent in all attempts to evaluate educational arguments, including those which dominated the common-school era of Horace Mann.

Concluding Remarks

This chapter has described a number of political-economic and ideological developments in early 19th-century Massachusetts which contrast with the preceding Jef­fersonian era. Whereas late 18th-century Virginia was fundamentally slave and agrarian in its economy and of English Protestant descent in its free population, Massachusetts was beginning to feel the pressures of urbanization, industrialization, and the cultural con­flict between it’s English and burgeoning Irish Catholic populations. While early-American Vir­ginia, like most of the young nation, was preoccupied with the challenge of protecting the freedoms won by a revolutionary generation, the challenge facing Mass­achusetts in the 50-year period after Jefferson ‘s death was to battle what Whig leaders perceived as the chaotic social disharmony brought about by urban­ization, industrialization, and Irish immigration. Ir. the context of these problems, plans for a state­
funded and even state-controlled school system looked far more desirable than such proposals had looked to Jefferson’s contemporaries, who rejected even state funding for common schooling, much less centralized state control.

In this latter context, the work and ideas of Horace Mann illustrate the dominant ways of thinking about schooling and society in Massachusetts. A prominent so­cial reformer even apart from his work in common schooling, Mann reflected the efforts of many of his Protestant Whig peers who engaged in such social­ progress campaigns as the abolition of slavery, the tem­perance movement, prison reform, mental health reform, women’s suffrage, and the provision of schooling for the poor. Like others of his era, Mann interpreted classical liberal ideology in accord with newly emerging social conditions. His liberal views of Protestantism, capitalism, and republicanism took a different shape than those commitments had taken for Jefferson in Vir­ginia. For example, Mann (somewhat like Benjamin Rush in culturally diverse Pennsylvania) saw the schools as a primary vehicle for building support for Republican and Protestant values in the population. Instead of ad­vocating Jefferson’s dictum, “That government governs best which governs least,” Mann advocated a much more active role for government in solving social and eco­ nomic problems that were not primary concerns for Jefferson.

Mann’s penchant for a more active government and for a government-controlled school system which would address a wide range of social problems, together with his belief in the moral benefits of proper education, led him to advocate a Prussian model of schooling derived from a thoroughly undemocratic European nation-state. This view stood in marked contrast, for example, with Jefferson’s distrust of European educational traditions, which he had castigated as aristocratic and nondemocra­cic in temper. Some of Mann’s contemporaries, includ­ ing Orestes Brownson, were, like Jefferson, mistrustful of European models of education for American children.
Mann, however, unlike Jefferson, was not driven by fear of tyranny but by fear of social disorder and moral decay.  While Jefferson believed that revolution was a desirable and even necessary form of progress, Mann’s classical lib­ral commitment to progress was limited to a belief in progress through moral and political consensus, the achievement of which he believed required a state system schooling.

Mann advocated the establishment of normal schools to professionalize and standardize teaching in order to build moral consensus among the youth of Massachu­ setts. Mann’s concerns for the economy and for a “loving” pedagogy led him to work successfully toward the femi­nization of the teaching profession, a move which would bring into public service the nurturing capacities which Mann believed were “natural” to women in the private sphere of the family.

While Mann believed he was advocating education for religious and republican virtue, some of his contempo­raries argued that he was instead instituting a system of schooling for social control. Whereas Mann believed chat his well-educated, Protestant, Whig values were appro­priate for all citizens, others argued that he was substitut­ ing Whig paternalism for the kind of democratic local control which Jefferson had insisted would ensure the in­volvement of all citizens in making decisions of public concern. This contrast, in the context of Massachusetts cities straining under the cultural conflicts between Irish Catholic immigrants and native-born Americans, raises difficult questions about the tensions of a common educational system in a culturally diverse society. Would Mann have been more democratic, for example, if he had advocated state funding but local control of schooling so that Irish Catholics could take responsibility for deciding how their children would be educated? Or do the re­quirements of social order dictate that the majority should determine what is best for the minority? Pardy at stake here is what was referred to in Chapter 2 as Jeffer­ son’s “development ideal of democracy”: that democracy is to be valued because genuine participation in decision making is itself educational. Thus, the active participa­tion of minority groups in the fundamental decisions af­fecting their lives is desirable for the educational effects it has on those groups. Similarly, the classical liberal “natu­ral rights” argument would support the view that people have a right to be self-governing and not subjected to what John Stuart Mill in England called “the tyranny of the majority.” Further, there is the matter of the contri­butions chat various subcultures make to the wider cul­ture and whether it, therefore, benefits the dominant culture to support and sustain such subcultures. Whether such commitments to cultural pluralism instead of cul­tural uniformity were a threat to the state was a matter of the sharp disagreement in Massachusetts, but it was settled in favor of Horace Mann and his supporters.