It is a bit ironic to be posting this article in praise of public
education from Japan, where I have come to help celebrate the centennial of
Seinan Gakuin, the private school system founded by Baptist missionaries.
Nevertheless, I am serious in what I write here about public education and its
great nineteenth-century champion, Horace Mann.
Some of my best memories from when I was a high school student are of
going to nearby Maryville, Mo., for music contests. They were held at the school
whose official name since 1972 has been Northwest Missouri State University.
One of the things I remember seeing on that campus as a high school
student was a building bearing the name Horace Mann Laboratory School. At the time I didn’t know who Horace Mann
was, but I later learned that he was one of the most important persons in the
development of public education in the United States.
That school was founded
110 years ago, in June 1906. Interestingly, Mann was born 110 years before the
beginning of that educational institution in Maryville that bears his name.
Born in Massachusetts
on
May 4, 1796, from ages ten to twenty Mann had no more than six weeks’ schooling
during any year. He made use of the town library, though, and at the age of 20 he
enrolled at Brown University, graduating in three years as valedictorian. He
went on to become an outstanding educator and politician.
After graduating from Brown, Mann practiced law before winning a seat
in the Massachusetts House of Representatives, where he served from 1827 to
1833. Then he served in the Massachusetts Senate until he became the head of
the nation’s first board of education in 1837. In his biography titled Horace Mann (1974), Robert B. Downs
called Mann “a highly effective missionary for universal public education.”
In addition to the
school in Maryville, Mo., there are more than 70 other Horace Mann schools
scattered across the nation.
There were also
people named after him. For example, recently I posted an article about Julian
Bond (see here). His father’s name was Horace Mann Bond—and
he also became a distinguished educator, serving as the first African-American
president of Lincoln University (in Penn.) from 1957 to 1972.
Often called “the father of American public education,” Mann championed
six innovative educational principles:
(1) the public should no longer remain ignorant; (2) that such education should be paid for, controlled, and sustained by an interested public; (3) that this education will be best provided in schools that embrace children from a variety of backgrounds; (4) that this education must be non-sectarian; (5) that this education must be taught by the spirit, methods, and discipline of a free society; and (6) that education should be provided by well-trained, professional teachers.
Perhaps the most controversial of
Mann’s principles was that it be non-sectarian. That idea was opposed by
clerics who thought that education should include religious
indoctrination—something that was being done widely at the time, and which R.J.
Rushdoony (introduced recently here) and his followers think ought to be done in home
schools now.
Mann became the first president
of Antioch College (Ohio) in 1852. There he employed the first woman faculty
member to be paid on an equal basis with her male colleagues. Mann’s
commencement message to the graduating class of 1859 included the words, “be ashamed to die until you have won some
victory for humanity.”
Those words are still repeated at
every commencement ceremony at Antioch College—and, indeed, they are words well
worth considering.
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