Horace Mann

Between the ages of 10 and 20 he never had more than six weeks of schooling in any year. What Franklin, Massachusetts, gave him instead was the first public library in America, and he read his way through it. He enrolled at Brown at 20, finished in three years, and delivered the valedictory on the progressive character of the human race. He read law at Litchfield, joined the bar at Dedham in 1823, and took a seat in the Massachusetts legislature in 1827, where he pushed asylums, temperance and a ban on lotteries. In 1830 he married Charlotte Messer. She died two years later, on August 1, 1832, and the grief never fully lifted.

The Massachusetts Board of Education was brand new in 1837, and when Mann took its secretaryship he gave up his law practice and his politics. For 11 years he walked the state inspecting schoolhouses, held teachers' conventions, founded The Common School Journal in 1838, and issued annual reports that legislatures in other states reprinted at their own expense. He opened the first American normal schools — teacher-training colleges at Lexington, Barre and Bridgewater — and argued that women should staff the classrooms. In 1843 he crossed to Prussia at his own cost and came home with a model: schools paid for out of taxes, teachers trained as professionals, one common experience for every child. Most northern states took some version of it. Then he took John Quincy Adams's vacated House seat and spent five years fighting the extension of slavery.

The man who put every child in Massachusetts into a common schoolhouse taught his own three sons at home. He was a phrenology devotee who believed schooling could correct what he took to be biological defects. He also condemned the alphabet, describing the letters as skeleton-shaped, bloodless, ghostly apparitions, and pushed teachers to start children on whole words instead. The alphabet method was effectively gone from American classrooms by 1890, and the argument over what replaced it has never closed — Rudolf Flesch reopened it in 1955 with Why Johnny Can't Read. At Antioch, the coeducational college he ran from 1852, he hired his niece Rebecca Pennell as the first woman in America paid on the same terms as male faculty, and he and his wife also fought the women students who wanted to meet men in the literary societies.

He collapsed after the 1859 commencement, where he told the graduating class to be ashamed to die until they had won some victory for humanity, and died of typhoid that August at Yellow Springs. His widow wrote that the blood of martyrdom waters the spot, then had the body moved to Providence to lie beside the first wife. Emerson called what happened at Antioch a fatal waste of labor and life. The name spread anyway. More than 50 American public schools carry it, an Emma Stebbins statue of him has stood outside the Massachusetts State House since 1863, an Illinois insurance company renamed itself for him in 1950, and Massachusetts still calls its district-authorized charter schools Horace Mann charters.

Horace Mann's life against the full span of the corpus.

• The Common School Journal other
  Founded and edited it as a national argument for tax-supported schooling 1838
• The Massachusetts normal schools company
  Lexington, Barre and Bridgewater — the first state teacher-training colleges in the country 1839
• Seventh Annual Report of the Secretary of the Board of Education book
  The Prussian report. Reprinted by legislatures and private printers on both sides of the Atlantic 1844
• A Few Thoughts for a Young Man book
  Published in Boston during his first term in Congress 1850
• Slavery: Letters and Speeches book
  His congressional case against extending slavery into the territories 1851
• Powers and Duties of Woman book
  Written the year he took over Antioch 1853

• 1819 aged ~23 Graduates from Brown in three years as valedictorian His oration was titled The Progressive Character of the Human Race.
• 1823 aged ~27 Admitted to the bar at Dedham
• August 1, 1832 aged 36 Charlotte Messer Mann dies two years into the marriage She was the daughter of a former president of Brown. He remarried in 1843.
• 1837 aged ~41 Becomes the first secretary of the Massachusetts Board of Education He withdrew from law and from politics to take a job nobody had held before.
• 1838 aged ~42 Founds The Common School Journal
• 1843 aged ~47 Tours European schools at his own expense, Prussia above all The report he wrote on his return was reprinted in England and in several American states.
• April 3, 1848 aged 51 Takes the House seat left vacant by the death of John Quincy Adams
• September 1852 aged 56 Nominated for governor and chosen president of Antioch College on the same day He lost the election and took the college.
• August 2, 1859 aged 63 Dies of typhoid at Yellow Springs, weeks after the commencement address

• John Quincy Adams 1767–1848
  Diplomat, sixth president, and later congressman who opposed slavery’s expansion and shaped early American foreign policy. succeeded in Congress
• Daniel Webster 1782–1852
  Senator and orator whose speeches on the Union and Constitution are among the greatest in history. attacked over the Compromise of 1850
• Catharine Beecher 1800–1878
  Pioneer in women's education who founded schools and advocated for female teachers across America. ally in feminizing the teaching force
• John Dewey 1859–1952
  Philosopher and educational reformer whose progressive ideas shaped modern American pedagogy. carried the word method forward
• Frederick Douglass 1818–1895
  Former slave who became a leading abolitionist, orator, and advocate for equal rights. named in his 1852 address on emancipation
• Ralph Waldo Emerson 1803–1882
  Essayist and philosopher who led the Transcendentalist movement and shaped American intellectual thought. mourned the waste at Antioch