Giants of American Education: Horace Mann

Technos: Quarterly for Education and Technology, Summer, 2000 by Sybil Eakin

Ultimately, Mann was able to select books that maintained neutrality in religious and political views, but the list reflected his own prejudice against works of fiction in favor of "practical" knowledge. For instance, he rejected the stories of Nathaniel Hawthorne, his future brother-in-law, saying, "They are written beautifully.... but we want something nearer to duty & Business."

Later, as the father of three young boys, Mann declared that his sons should not be read Mother Goose rhymes or the fairy tales of the Brothers Grimm--the wonders of science were to suffice for his children. He was quietly subverted by his sister-in-law, Elizabeth Peabody, who delighted the children with her recitation of nursery verses and tales of giants.

ANTIDOTE TO POVERTY

From the outset, the principle of statewide public education sparked controversies that continued throughout Mann's tenure in office. Struck by the large number of Irish immigrant children living in squatters' camps beside the railroad lines on which their fathers worked, he pushed for mandatory education laws that would require towns and districts to provide schooling for all children, whether permanent residents or not. He also wanted parents held responsible for their children's attendance. But the very immigrant groups the laws were designed to help were among his greatest opponents. Without education themselves, the laborers saw little value in having their children at-tend school when they could work in factories and add to the family income. In fact, they regarded truant officers as "kidnappers."

Property owners whose taxes were required to support schools for immigrant children were equally opposed, and the: newly powerful Jacksonian Democrats, who gained the governorship of Massachusetts in 1839 with the backing of labor groups, set out to abolish the State Board of Education and all its activities.

Mann cited self-interest as well as morality to defend the principle of free education. In the Common School Journal, after pointing out that the country "owes a vast economical debt to that class of people, whose labor has been mainly instrumental in rearing the great material structures of which we so often boast," he argued that "every wise, humane measure adopted for their welfare, directly promotes our own security. For ... the children of this people will soon possess the rights of men, whether they possess the characters of men or not."

In the Twelfth Annual Report of 1848, Mann developed this argument at great length under the heading "Intellectual Education, as a Means of Removing Poverty, and Securing Abundance." He cited figures showing that Massachusetts, because of its dense population, "industrial condition, and its business operations" risked exposure to the "fatal extremes of overgrown wealth and desperate poverty."

The remedy, of course, was education, which he said was "the great equalizer of the conditions of men.... If education be equably diffused, it will draw property after it ... for such a thing never did happen, and never can happen, as that an intelligent and practical body of men should be permanently poor."