MANN, HORACE (1796-1859), educator and statesman, was born in Franklin, Mass., May 4, 1796. His parents' poverty subjected him to privations, and until he was 15, he never at tended school more than eight or ten weeks in a year. He received effective instruction, however, from the able pastor of the village church. In his loth year he fell in with a good college preparatory teacher. In six months he fitted himself for admission to the sophomore class of Brown university, which he entered in Sept., 1816. He graduated with highest honours in 1819. He then en tered a lawyer's office at Wrentham, but was soon called back to the university, where he served for two years as tutor in the Latin and Greek languages and as librarian. On leaving Providence the second time, in 1821, he entered the celebrated law school con ducted by Judge Gould, at Litchfield, Conn., where he had a fine record. In he was admitted to the bar. He continued very i successfully in the practice of law for 14 years, until he entered upon an educational career in 1837. At first he made his residence at Dedham, but in 1833 removed to Boston.
About the time that he established himself at Dedham, he began to take an active interest in public affairs. He was elected to the Massachusetts house of representatives in 1827, and was re-elected each year until transferred to the State senate in 1833. Here he served four years, the last two as president of the senate, where he was directly responsible for the enactment of four important measures: (I) a law against the use of alcoholic bev erages: (2) against the traffic in lottery tickets; (3) the estab lishment of State hospitals for the insane; (4) an act creating the State board of education.
For a long period prior to the establishment of a State board of education, there had been in Massachusetts an apparent retro gression of education, due to the increase of local self-government and the decrease of central authority. It was evident that public schools diminished in efficiency. A twofold opposition began some years before 1828, which took, on the one hand, the form of an attempt to remedy the deficiency of public schools by the estab lishment of academies, and on the other hand, that of a vigorous attack by educational reformers, such as Horace Mann, who sought to replace the district system by a township unit. The
establishment of a State board of education and the appointment of Mann as its secretary, therefore, mark an era of return from the extreme of decentralization to the proper union of local and central authority.
Horace Mann was chosen secretary of the new State board of education because an educational statesman was needed rather than a mere schoolman. At a considerable financial sacrifice, Mann accepted the small salary attached to the position. It was a board of limited powers, and its success depended upon the personality of its secretary. It could neither found nor admin ister schools. Its function was to collect and diffuse information; it could pursuade but could not command. As secretary, Mann's plan of campaign included four leading features : (I) The hold ing of public meetings and the agency of public addresses; (2) Better training of teachers by a system of county institutes, con ducted by the leading educators of Massachusetts and other States, and the founding of normal schools; (3) Ample provision for the collection of statistics; (4) Establishment of a periodical, The Common School Journal, to influence the educational public in Massachusetts.
The 12 annual reports prepared by Mann, as secretary, on the condition of education in Massachusetts and elsewhere, includ ing his discussions of the aims, purposes and means of education, occupy a commanding position in American educational history. in May, 1843, Mann went to Europe, where he spent five months in the study of educational conditions. His 7th report embodied the result of this tour abroad, and drew an attack upon him from a group of schoolmasters of Boston. His praise of European schools, and particularly his commendation of oral instruction, the word method in teaching reading, and the abolition of corporal punishment in Germany, wounded the sensibilities of the Boston schoolmasters, and a bitter controversy ensued. He was also assailed by religious sectarians, on the ground that he was secular izing the public schools. His skilful administration as secretary gave him a central position in the history of American educa tional development. It proved a stimulus to educational progress in Massachusetts and made the Massachusetts system the proto type of other State systems.