Horace Mann

Horace Mann built the American public school system as a matter of political argument rather than of pedagogy, and the argument was that a republic cannot survive an ignorant electorate. He grew up poor in Franklin, Massachusetts, with about six weeks of schooling a year and the town library as his education, and became a lawyer and then a state legislator. In 1837 he gave up a promising political career to take the new and unpaid-in-prestige post of secretary of the Massachusetts Board of Education, and spent twelve years touring schools, writing twelve annual reports that were read across the country, and campaigning for a common school - free, tax-funded, open to all classes, taught by trained professionals, and religiously non-sectarian. Every one of those points was fought. Taxpayers objected to funding the education of other people's children, orthodox clergy objected that non-sectarian meant godless, and schoolmasters objected to being inspected. He founded the first state normal schools in the United States to train teachers, doubled teacher salaries, lengthened the school year, and pushed women into teaching, which changed the profession permanently and cheaply. He went to Prussia in 1843 and came back advocating its graded classrooms and its ban on corporal punishment. He entered Congress in 1848 in John Quincy Adams's seat and spoke against the extension of slavery, then became first president of Antioch College in Ohio, which admitted women and black students. His last address to its graduates told them to be ashamed to die until they had won some victory for humanity, which is on his statue in Boston. His brother had drowned as a young man and a local minister preached that the death was damnation, which turned Mann against Calvinism permanently. He is on a postage stamp and there are Horace Mann schools in most American states.

• Lived: 1796 CE – 1859 CE
• Nationality: American
• Roles: politician