by Dan Rather and Elliot Kirschner
What Unites Us: Reflections on Patriotism
Page 203:
Given the current struggles with the United States, it may be hard to remember that up until relatively recently our school system was the envy of the world,. That was an outgrowth of our changing country, for while some public schools existed early on, it was really the rise of education reformers in the antebellum era that set us on the path to true public education. Few loom larger than Horace Mann, who argued that a truly free populace could not remain ignorant and that communities must provide nonsectarian public schools, staffed by trained teachers and open to students of diverse backgrounds. His reforms for primary eventually secondary education, begun in Massachusetts, soon spread to other parts of the country, especially as the nation was shifting from an agricultural to an industrial economy, and from rural areas to urban.