Horace Mann

American educator

• Born: May 4, 1796
• Birthplace: Franklin, Massachusetts
• Died: August 2, 1859
• Place of death: Yellow Springs, Ohio

As a legislator and educator, Mann initiated the first state mental hospital and the first comprehensive system of public education in the United States.

Early Life

Horace Mann was the fourth of five children of Thomas Mann, a farmer in Franklin, Massachusetts, and the former Rebecca Stanley of nearby Attleboro. Mann traced his American roots, on his father’s side, back to William Man, who came to Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1635. None of his ancestors achieved any distinction before him. When he later looked back on his youth, he could not remember a time when he and the family did not work together planting, cultivating, and harvesting. As Franklin became a center of bonnet-making, Mann braided straw for women’s bonnets. He would later believe strongly in the value of work and would work hard all his life. However, he would also come to believe that he had been made to work too hard in childhood.

At twelve years of age, Mann rejected the Calvinism of his town’s ministers and began to construct for himself a more benevolent interpretation of Christianity by which to live. He was also critical of the teachers in Franklin’s one-room schools, although up to the age of fifteen, he never attended school for more than eight or ten weeks out of the year. As the town library held few books, none suitable for children, opportunities for self-education were also severely limited.

Aspiring to a college education, Mann received tutoring from a minister who happened to be a Brown University graduate. Like a number of other boys from his area, Mann enrolled in Brown, where he excelled in composition and oratory and was graduated in 1819 at the head of his class. Thereupon he studied law in Litchfield, Connecticut, and after an apprenticeship in Dedham, Massachusetts, he was admitted to practice there in 1825. Thus, at the age of twenty-nine, this industrious young man had yet to establish himself in his profession.

Life’s Work

Prophetically, the event that brought Mann into prominence locally was a speech that marked a patriotic occasion involving three famous political figures. When PresidentsJohn Adams and Thomas Jefferson both died on the fiftieth anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence, Dedham chose Mann to speak at a memorial service, and among his listeners was President John Quincy Adams. Then as later, the eloquence of this tall, intense lawyer commanded the attention of all who valued the art of public speaking.

Mann’s law practice blossomed after this 1826 speech, and in 1827 his district sent him to the Massachusetts House of Representatives, where he worked vigorously for the establishment of railroads and the industrialization of his region. His penchant for reform emerged in his efforts in behalf of the temperance movement, but seeing the issue as a social rather than specifically religious one, he rejected the sectarian bias of those who dominated the movement. Nevertheless, his bill to restrict the licensing of liquor vendors became law in 1831.

Mann’s interest in institutional reform dated from his inspection of the Dedham House of Correction in 1828, where he found appalling conditions, especially among mentally disturbed inmates. He began immediately to collect information on the insane confined in county jails throughout Massachusetts and proposed the establishment of a state facility to care humanely for these forgotten people, many of whom he correctly surmised would be able to return to society. He struggled personally with the difficult problem of an architectural design adequate to solve the problems of noise, sanitation, and security. The result was the State Lunatic Hospital at Worcester, which opened early in 1833.

These projects coincided with his courtship of Charlotte Messer, their marriage in 1830, and her death less than two years later. Crushed by this personal tragedy, Mann withdrew from politics and reform activities for a time, but in 1834, encouraged by friends, including Elizabeth and Mary Peabody, he campaigned successfully for a seat in the Massachusetts senate. In his second one-year term, he was elected its president and used his power to promote various reforms. This gray-haired and gaunt but energetic legislator found his cause of causes in the plight of the Massachusetts common schools, poorly funded and, in many communities, nonexistent. After Governor Edward Everett and the legislature cooperated to establish a state board of education in 1837, a governor’s committee, realizing the importance of forceful leadership at the outset, chose Mann as its first secretary.

Knowing little about education, Mann pored over the relatively few books available on the subject. Convinced that “in a republic ignorance is a crime,” Mann found too few resources available to dispel it in 1837, a year of nationwide financial panic. Available town reports informed him that schools were regularly small, shabby, and crowded, teachers unprepared and underpaid, and parents skeptical of the utility of public education. Many young teachers—Henry David Thoreau in Concord and Herman Melville in Pittsfield among them—soon quit in disgust.

Although he might have retained his senate seat, Mann judged his new task a full-time one and declined candidacy in the fall of 1837. He consulted with friends such as Samuel Gridley Howe, first director of the school eventually to be known as the Perkins Institute for the Blind, and William Ellery Channing, Unitarian minister and friend of reformers; he visited schools, gathering, organizing, and interpreting data from around the state; and on January 1, 1838, delivered the first of his twelve famous Annual Reports (1838-1849) to the Board of Education.

Over the next twelve years, Mann promoted the establishment of normal schools for the training of teachers, organized teachers’ conventions at which he and other educators lectured, established the Common School Journal, urged more systematic curricula, largely overcame public apathy and suspicion, and began the task of extending educational opportunity to agrarian families and to the children of poor laborers in the mushrooming manufacturing towns. Throughout his stewardship, controversy swirled around Secretary Mann. Independent New Englanders balked at the idea of imposing an educational system too closely resembling the highly systematic Prussian model that attracted Mann and his supporters, who considered some degree of centralization of educational authority and standardization of school curricula, methods, and administrative procedures essential to progress. Not the least controversial of Mann’s proposals was mandatory full-time schooling for all children up to the age of sixteen—not necessarily in common schools but to the state’s satisfaction.

In the midst of these duties, Mann married Mary Peabody, a quiet but strong-willed woman who had long loved the now middle-aged reformer. She bore him three sons and shared his enthusiasms. After the death of John Quincy Adams in February of 1848, the Whigs nominated Mann for the former president’s seat in the U.S. House of Representatives. Elected in April of that year, Mann quickly established himself as an uncompromising foe of slavery. Thus, when Daniel Webster supported Henry Clay’s Compromise of 1850, Mann broke with Webster, and the latter’s forces retaliated by blocking Mann’s renomination later that year. Despite this setback, Mann was returned to Congress as the nominee of the Free-Soil Party.

Two years later, the founders of a new college in Yellow Springs, Ohio, sought Mann as its first president even as the Massachusetts Free-Soilers were nominating him for governor. When Mann’s hoped-for coalition of antislavery Whigs, Democrats, and Free-Soilers fell short of victory, Mann accepted the presidency of the new Antioch College. Established by a Protestant sect called “the Christian Connexion,” which Mann judged sufficiently liberal in its tenets, Antioch also pleased him with its then rare commitment to coeducation. However, the college was soon reeling under the sort of sectarian wrangling that its new chief officer had always tried to avoid. In addition, Mann sent out confusing signals with his strict disciplinary code and aversion to the conservative theology so often associated with it. His lack of financial experience also hampered him. Contemporaneously with Antioch’s first graduation in 1857—another panic year—the trustees were forced to declare bankruptcy.

Mann was now in his early sixties, tall and dignified, with an abundant shock of gray hair, his eyes deep-set under bushy brows, his wide mouth set in the determined way he had always displayed in a crisis. Two years later, a group of Mann’s friends purchased the college and restored it to solvency. The years in Yellow Springs had taken a terrible toll on Mann physically, however, and he had little vitality left. The ill president retained his oratorical gift to the last; his last speech, at the 1859 baccalaureate services, proved to be one of his best, ending with the admonition to the graduates: “Be ashamed to die until you have won some victory for humanity.” He died only a little more than a month later, on August 2, 1859.

Significance

Had Horace Mann never turned his considerable talents to education at all, he would still rank as a notable American. His work on behalf of the mentally ill alone represents a victory for humanity, as the institutions all over the United States now usually designated “state hospitals” make clear. At a time when only occasional private philanthropy stood between the mentally disturbed and a life of unbroken degradation and captivity, Mann made their cause public business and a matter of public conscience.

Among the few in his age to understand the importance of conducting social reform on a nonsectarian basis, Mann often risked the opposition of fellow reformers by refusing to allow religious denominations to capture and dominate the causes they shared. His uncompromising attitude was both a strength and a weakness. When he managed to sweep aside obstacles to reform, as in the areas of public education and mental health, he effected great changes in a short time. On other occasions, by alienating possible supporters and rousing the active hostility of opponents, he did his causes little good.

A measure of Mann’s educational influence is the extent to which his controversial ideas have become conventional wisdom. Mann, more than any other single person, is responsible for bringing Massachusetts, and in turn the nation, to acknowledge the importance of providing public education for all mentally competent citizens. Also considered radical when he proposed it was the concomitant idea that the state might require schooling for youths up to the age of sixteen. His measures to improve the profession of teaching—the normal schools, conferences, the Common School Journal, and many others—enormously increased the status and effectiveness of teachers.

Mann moved adroitly between legislative and professional educational positions. Resigning a post of political sway for a thankless job as secretary of a new state board with little support among the powerful, he succeeded by the unlikely method of writing a series of annual reports to his superiors. Again, late in his career, he gave up politics to devote himself to a troubled fledgling college, and although his health broke under the strain, he brought Antioch to the point where it could survive and take its place among the more respected American colleges.

Trained in the oratorical mode considered vital to political success during the early decades of the republic, Mann used his eloquence not to extend his personal prestige but to bring about humanitarian reforms. He renounced the career of political leadership for which he was so obviously qualified to foster the education of people both rich and poor, male and female, black and white, at levels from elementary school to college. He could afford to yield power because of a gift he manifested most strikingly when, as in his years as a school board secretary, his power was most circumscribed: a capacity for moral leadership that he invariably exercised to increase the well-being of his fellow citizens.

Bibliography

Downs, Robert B. Horace Mann: Champion of Public Schools. Boston: Twayne, 1974. A biography emphasizing Mann’s educational ideas and their influence. This short work is essentially uncritical and relies chiefly upon secondary sources.

Gibbon, Peter H. “A Hero of Education.” Education Week 21, no. 38 (May 29, 2002): 33. A profile of Mann, containing information about his life and career, his opinions of education, character, and citizenship, and his campaign to improve public schools.

Gutek, Gerald L. Historical and Philosophical Foundations of Education: A Biographical Introduction. Upper Saddle River, N.J.: Merrill, 1997. This historical overview of education includes a biography of Mann, examining his philosophy and impact upon education.

Hinsdale, Burke Aaron. Horace Mann and the Common School Revival in the United States. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1898, 1937. This relatively detailed study gives a turn-of-the-century perspective on Mann.

Hubbell, George Allen. Horace Mann, Educator, Patriot, and Reformer: A Study in Leadership. Philadelphia: William F. Fell, 1910. Hubbell was an Antioch College professor who wrote many articles on Mann. As its title suggests, the book is more appreciative than critical, but Hubbell knew his subject better than all but two or three of Mann’s biographers.

Mann, Mary Tyler Peabody. Life of Horace Mann. Boston: Walker, Fuller, 1865. Reprint. Miami: Mnemosyne, 1969. Mann’s widow occasionally depicts scenes, such as that of his death, which go beyond the scope of any other Mann biographer, but this work (which is perhaps the second most valuable of the books on Mann) deserves particular notice for its generous selections from his letters and journals.

Messerli, Jonathan. Horace Mann: A Biography. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1972. An educator himself, Messerli is most interested in his subject’s educational reforms, but this book is the longest, most thorough, and most painstakingly documented work on Mann. As such, it must be regarded as the standard biography, although it does have some drawbacks. Its full index is idiosyncratically organized (especially the ten pages of “Mann, Horace” entries) and difficult to use. Messerli seldom attempts to generalize, to fuse his welter of detail into an interpretive whole. His style, however, is clear and entirely serviceable.

Morgan, Joy Elmer. Horace Mann at Antioch. Washington, D.C.: National Education Association, 1938. A lengthy labor of love by a Mann enthusiast, this work is only partly biographical, the rest being Morgan’s compilation of tributes, Mann’s Antioch speeches, and some other material of interest only to devotees of the college.

Tharp, Louise Hall. Until Victory: Horace Mann and Mary Peabody. Boston: Little, Brown, 1953. Readers seeking an intimate view of two kindred spirits will enjoy this book. Although Tharp does not convey a sense of the basis of Mann’s greatness, this book is professionally researched and accurate as well as eminently readable.

Williams, Edward I. F. Horace Mann, Educational Statesman. New York: Macmillan, 1937. In many respects this book is superseded by that of Messerli, yet it remains a useful middle-length biography.