A School for the Common Good
Does Horace Mann Still Matter?
by Lawrence Baines
A
new book entitled Horace Mann’s Vision of the Public Schools: Is
It Still Relevant?* would seem tailor-made for review in an issue
of educational HORIZONS that examines “A School for the
Common Good.” Horace Mann’s Vision does succinctly summarize cur-
rent controversies in education including technology, school finance,
and No Child Left Behind, and the writing is informed. However, aside
from the first twenty-seven pages, this odd little book has little to do
with Horace Mann or his vision. Instead, the focus on educational hot
topics leaves only a sentence or two of conjecture per chapter about
what Horace Mann “might have thought” tacked on.
Typical is chapter 6 on “academic grouping.” Hayes writes,“In 1990,
92 percent of the schools had academic tracking” (p. 46),and “There has
been a very evident trend that is reducing the number of schools using
the practice of tracking students” (p. 47), but the only data presented in
support of the decline in tracking come from a textbook published a
decade ago.
Stylistically, Hayes is fond of using bullets and citing long passages
from writers other than Mann. Bullets have their place (I use them later
in this essay), but not to the point that they constitute half of all text. In
chapter 6, a chapter scarcely longer than eight pages, Hayes uses a total
of sixteen bullets and cites five long passages from books or journal arti-
cles. None of the extended passages are taken from Mann’s work. Hayes
closes chapter 6 by citing Diane Ravitch’s
Left Back (2000) and simply
noting,“I expect that Horace Mann w
ould agree” (p. 53).
Too bad. Many Americans today are more likely to associate Horace
Mann with insurance (an insurance company for teachers formed in
1945 uses Mann’s name) than public education. So rather than ruminate
on a w
ell-intentioned book only peripherally related to Horace Mann at
best, I decided this was the opportunity to revisit Mann and his vision
.
268
*By William Hayes. Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield Education, 2006. Paperback, 171 pages; ISBN
1578863643.
Who, then, was Horace Mann, and why are his ideas so relevant to
us today?
* * *
One of the pivotal moments of Mann’s life came at age fourteen,
when his brother Stephen drowned in a terrible accident. In Stephen’s
eulogy,a Calvinist minister preached that,because Stephen Mann had yet
to be confirmed, his soul would suffer damnation. The incident dramati-
cally affected Mann’s view of religion; he eventually became a
Unitarian—as did his contemporary Ralph Waldo Emerson, who was
seven years younger.
Also like Emerson, Mann lost his father at an early age and a wife to
poor health after only two years of marriage. Both men remarried and
had families with their second wives, who showed remarkable patience
with the “eternal flame” that each man kept for the memory of his first
wife. Both Mann and Emerson knew Abraham Lincoln and Nathaniel
Hawthorne; in fact, the sister of Mann’s second wife (Mary Peabody) was
married to Hawthorne.
As a young man, Mann became a lawyer, then a senator for the state
of Massachusetts. At the height of his popularity as a politician, he was
invited to take an advisory position in education for the state govern-
ment. The position did not pay well, nor did it have any real power.
Furthermore, the experiment of the common schools had just been
launched;schools were in disarray and disrepair across the state. Despite
the challenges, Mann resolved to reform common schools to the point
that they would provide an education superior in all ways to the best pri-
vate schools of the day. He used his position in the government as a bully
pulpit to persuade the citizens of Massachusetts that the future of their
state was integrally tied to the education of all children, not just the best
and brightest. Mann considered education the antidote to a plethora of
social ills—poverty, crime, poor health, ignorance, sloth, and greed.
In his lifetime,Mann helped create the first public institution for the
mentally ill (Massachusetts State Hospital for the Insane), promoted the
idea of colleges specifically designed for the training of teachers, estab-
lished libraries within schools,and presided over a college (Antioch) that
was one of the first to offer open admission to men and women of all
races. However, perhaps his greatest contribution was the idea that
American children should be provided with a free, nonselective, aca-
demically challenging, fair, and morally just system of schooling. In his
appeals to the public, he posited schools as a way to unify and edify a
diverse nation.
In a government like ours, each individual must think of the
welfare of the State, as well as of the welfare of his own family,
and, therefore, of the children of others as well as his own. It
Does Horace Mann Still Matter?
269
becomes, then, a momentous question, whether the children in
our schools are educated in reference to themselves and their
private interests only, or with a regard to the great social duties
and prerogatives that await them. . . . However loftily the intel-
lect of man may have been gifted, however skillfully it may have
been trained, if it be not guided by a sense of justice, a love of
mankind, and a devotion to duty, its possessor is only a more
splendid,as he is a more dangerous[,] barbarian. (Mann 1965,88)
One of the obstacles to implementing Mann’s philosophy has always
been that the wealthy have little incentive to abandon their privately
run, well-appointed institutions, within which they wield significant
power, for the motley vibrancy of the democratically controlled public
school. Still, Mann managed to communicate that all Americans, espe-
cially the most affluent, had a shared social responsibility for the future
of the country. “If one class possesses all the wealth and the education,
while the residue of society is ignorant and poor, it matters not by what
name the relation between them may be called: the latter, in fact and in
truth, will be the servile dependents and subjects of the former” (Mann
1965,
124). Certainly, the phenomenon of “bright flight” from urban
schools has demonstrated that the sense of societal obligation can be
ephemeral, especially when it comes to the nitty-gritty of school choice.
However, the demise of public schools cannot be attributed solely to the
negligence of the rich, but also to the changing landscape of the poor.
In nineteenth-century America,few social services were provided by
the government, so the poor worked long hours, usually as subsistence
farmers or as workers in unregulated industries. With regard to child
labor, the most progressive state in the nation was Massachusetts, which
in 1842 had the temerity to limit the work days for children under four-
teen years of age to a “mere” ten hours. Few other states followed
Massachusetts’ drastic lead, and it took almost one hundred years, until
1938, for the first federal child labor law to be established.
For the poor children of the nineteenth century, even a decrepit
public school run by an untrained teacher could constitute a marked,
immediate improvement in the quality of life. An additional boon was
that schools offered the promise of a way out of poverty. However, by
suggesting that children be required to attend school, Mann earned the
wrath of many poor families who needed the income fr
om their c
hildr
en
to survive.
Today, a smaller percentage of Americans is poor and the view of
schools as the way out of poverty seems less certain. For high school stu-
dents who read about a peer signing a 100-million-dollar contract to play
professional sports and who see the neighborhood drug dealer wheel
around in a new Lexus all day, the prospect of twelve years of hard aca-
educational HORIZONS Summer 2006
270
demic work in exchange for a chance at a demanding job at a moderate
salary may seem like a sucker’s deal. Surviving without a high school
diploma or making a living by working for minimum wage still may be
within the realm of possibility, but it takes a great deal of effort and a
willingness to work (Ehrenreich 2002). Although some of the poor still
regard the public school with reverence,many would be among the first
to abandon it were an alternative more strongly linked to upward mobil-
ity available.
The truth is that an increasing number of public schools, especially
in urban areas, are faltering. Rather than trying to save them, urban
dwellers are joining forces with prosperous suburbanites to circumvent
public schools by demanding private school vouchers. At the same time,
anti-tax advocates are undermining the survival of public schools by
loosening the ties between property tax apportionments and funding.
Recently, even the Southern Baptist Convention, the nation’s largest
Protestant denomination, drafted a resolution urging its sixteen million
constituents to flee the public schools (
Toledo Blade 2006).
Apparently, the moral imperative of public schools as the great dem-
ocratic, humanistic leveler of social class is losing momentum. The foun-
dation on which Mann based his argument for the common school as a
place that would “obliterate factitious distinctions in society” (in Cremin
1957, 87) is the very reason many Americans pull their children from
public schools. That is, many parents do not want a level playing field;
they do not want their children to go to school with children who look
different or might have different beliefs; and they do not want the iden-
tities of their children threatened or amalgamated into a melting pot. An
unfortunate outcome of the multicultural movement has been the valu-
ing of ethnic, religious, or personal beliefs over the welfare of the whole.
In the twenty-first century, Mann would be aghast at those and sev-
eral other developments. To name a few:
• Mann was concerned with the pursuit of academic excellence
and believed instruction should be adapted to meet individual
needs, but state standardized exams assess the same minimal com-
petencies of all students. The teacher is expected to adhere and
teach to the standards, not to individual talents.
• Mann was convinced that because teaching was “the most diffi-
cult of all the ar
ts,
and the pr
of
oundest of all sciences”
(in Cremin
1957,
21),
teac
her
s needed to be well-prepared, knowledgeable
leaders of impeccable virtue—but more and more teachers are
entering the profession through alternative certification without
any specialized university training or previous experience with
children (Baines, forthcoming). Apparently the Democratic Party,
Does Horace Mann Still Matter?
271
a long-time supporter of teacher education, is considering an edu-
cation platform that recommends jettisoning teacher preparation
altogether (Wessel 2006).
• Mann favored a rigorous program of physical fitness, but today’s
children are heavier and more sedentary than ever before
(Centers for Disease Control 2006).
• Mann believed the most important purpose of public schools was
to provide children with moral guidance. Although Mann vehe-
mently opposed using schools for religious indoctrination, he
believed that tolerance, generosity, respect for others, and dili-
gence could be learned. To judge by what receives the most pub-
lic attention, test scores provide the sole indicator of success for a
school. At the urging of various special-interest groups, morals
have been purposefully excised from the curriculum, though
“character education” has a few adherents in selected areas of the
country (Murphy 2002).
As described by Downs (1974), the state of the public schools
before Horace Mann became Secretary of the Massachusetts Board of
Education (1837–1848) holds an eerie similarity to public schools today.
Parents who were able to pay for their children’s education
sent them to the academies and private schools, while those
lacking financial means patronized the public schools. Class dis-
tinctions, a new phenomenon in Massachusetts, arose. The best
teachers and the best pupils turned to the private schools. The
most intelligent and the wealthier members of the community
sent their children to the academies, concurrently losing inter-
est in and resisting adequate tax support for public schools. In
the popular mind the common schools came to denote “pauper
schools,” attended by children of the poorer classes only. (p. 35)
What has been missing in twenty-first-century debates about public
education is a high-profile, fearless advocate for public schools in the
mold of Horace Mann. Although the U.S. Secretary of Education’s post
would seem a logical bully pulpit, the office’s incumbent, Margaret
Spellings, is a former lobbyist gifted in the pragmatics of political com-
pr
omise,not in drumming up support for the educative value of an open
and free system of schools. In fact, much recent federal intervention in
education seems to assume a “pauper schools” trajectory for public
sc
hools o
v
er the ne
xt f
e
w decades.
Reading Mann’s personal journals and letters (Mann 1937; Messerli
1972) makes clear that the great reformer often felt ambivalent about his
role as the “father of public education.” He lived in shabby dwellings for
educational HORIZONS Summer 2006
272
most of his life, worked relentlessly, never made much money, and gave
away what little he had. Unlike Emerson, who came to earn huge sums of
money on the lecture circuit,Mann lectured and wrote pro bono (Gibbon
2002). Yet two months before his death, he still had the chutzpah to tell
the graduating class at Antioch College (where he was president), “Be
ashamed to die until you have won some victory for humanity” (Mann
1965, 243).
Although it is difficult to maintain optimism about the fate of public
schools, every once in a while we can detect a spark of Mann’s philoso-
phy rising from the ashes of today’s schools. One such spark has come
from an eighteen-year-old Senegalese refugee named Amadou Ly, who
recently helped his East Harlem high school science team win accolades
in a nationwide robotics competition (Bernstein 2006). Ly, who has lived
on his own without either parent since he was fourteen, has become
one of the stars of the East Harlem team. If the young man has anyone
to thank for the free and open schools of New York City, it’s not the pres-
ident or Mayor Bloomberg or Senator Hillary Clinton or Secretary of
Education Margaret Spellings. The only folks Amadou Ly need thank are
his teachers and Horace Mann.
References
Baines, L. Forthcoming. “The Transmogrification of Teacher Certification.” In
The Teacher Educator.
Bernstein, N. 2006. “Student’s Prize Is a Trip into Immigration Limbo.”
New
York Times
,April 26: A1, A19.
Centers for Disease Control. 2006.
Physical Activity and Health: A Report of
the Surgeon General: Adolescents and Young Adults
. Retrieved May 1,
2006, from <http://www.cdc.gov/nccdphp/sgr/adoles.htm>.
Cremin, L., ed. 1957.
The Republic and the School. New York:Teachers College
Press.
Downs, H. 1974.
Horace Mann. New York:Twayne Publishers.
Ehrenreich, B. 2002.
Nickel and Dimed in America. New York: Henry Holt.
Gibbon, P. 2002. “A Hero of Education.”
Education Week 21 (38): 33–36.
Hayes,W. 2006.
Horace Mann’s Vision of the Public Schools: Is It Still
Relevant?
Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield.
Mann, H. 1965.
Horace Mann on the Crisis in Education. Yellow Springs,
Ohio:
Antioc
h Press.
———. 1937.
Life of Horace Mann. Washington, D.C.: National Education
Association.
Messerli, J. 1972.
Horace Mann: A Biography. New York:Alfred Knopf.
Murphy, M. 2002.
Character Education in America’s Blue Ribbon Schools.
Lanham, Md.: Scarecrow.
Ravitch, D. 2000.
Left Back. New York: Simon & Schuster.
Toledo Blade. 2006. “Southern Baptist Activists Urge Pulling Kids from Public
Schools.” April 29: B3.
Wessel, D. 2006. “It’s the Teachers, Stupid.”
Wall Street Journal, April 6: A2.
Does Horace Mann Still Matter?
273
274
Critical Friends, Core Values:
Empowering Educators to
Achieve Excellence,
Fall 2005, 1–64
How Are the Boys Doing?,
Winter 2006, 65–128
Strengths-based Education:
Research and Resources,
Spring 2006, 129–200
A School for the Common Good,
Summer 2006, 201–276
Achieving the Lake Wobegon Effect:
Making Every Child Above
Average . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 203
African American Boys and the
Discipline Gap: Balancing
Educators’ Uneven Hand . . . . 102
And Then There Is Hope . . . . . . . 39
Are Public Schools Successful
? . . 265
Austin, Donald B. . . . . . . . . . . . . 176
Baines, Lawrence . . . . . . . . . 221, 268
Bambino, Debbie . . . . . . . . . . . . . 47
Baron, Daniel (interview) . . . . . . . 17
Bedford,April Whatley . . . . . . . . 262
Bisplinghoff, Betty . . . . . . . . . . . . . 35
Building on a Foundation of
Str
engths
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 176
Cantw
ell,
Linda
. . . . . . . . . . . . . .
161
Carpenter
,
W
ade
A. . . . . . . . . 69, 214
Cheating Impossib
le:
T
r
ansforming Educational
V
alues . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 136
Clabaugh, Alison A. . . . . . . . . . 8, 208
Clabaugh, Gary K. . . . . . . 8, 141, 208
Clifton Youth StrengthsExplorer
Assessment,The:
Identifying the Talents
of Today’s Youth . . . . . . . . . . . 183
Collaboration, Inquiry, and Reflection:
A Principal Creates a CFG-Inspired
Learning Environment . . . . . . . 58
Connell, Diane . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 94
Craig, Robert . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 265
Creating Moral Schools:
The Enabling Potential of
Critical Friends Groups . . . . . . 53
Creating the Teaching-Learning
Environment You’ve Always
Dreamed Of . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 161
Day in the Life of Schoolwide
CFGs,A . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 29
Delicate Cycle,The . . . . . . . . . . . 257
Dichter, Alan . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 60
Does Horace Mann Still
Matter? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 268
Education as the Practice of
Freedom . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 50
Every Moment Counts:
Five Principles for Boosting the
Achievement of Struggling
Students . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 251
Feden, Preston D. . . . . . . . . . . . . . 79
Fiction High School:Where
Things Have to Make Sense . . . 79
F
oster, Hal . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 221
Galloway, Melinda . . . . . . . . . . . . 257
Gallup Organization,The . . 170, 183
Gerzon-K
essler
,Ari . . . . . . . . . . . 251
Grandin,Temple . . . . . . . . . . . . . 229
Index
educational HORIZONS
®
, Vol. 84, Fall 2005–Summer 2006
Greene, Camilla . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 50
Gunzelmann, Betsy . . . . . . . . . . . . 94
Gurian, Michael . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 87
How Boys Learn . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 87
Howe, Quincy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 235
Hudson, Jill . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 58
In This Savage Land: Schooling
and American Priorities . . . . . 208
Jacobs, Sue . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 112
Kessler, Rachael . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 247
Law, Bruce . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 53
Learning to See with a Third Eye:
Working to Address Inequity
Effectively . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 47
Legal Evolution of Intelligent
Design,The . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 145
Listening,Writing, Drawing:
The Artistic Response of
Incarcerated Youth to Young-
Adult Literature . . . . . . . . . . . 112
Lopez, Shane J. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 157
Malone, Bobby G. . . . . . . . . . . . . 121
Math on the Fast Track . . . . . . . . 235
McCarthy, Martha M. . . . . . . . . . . 145
Milner, Murray, Jr. . . . . . . . . . . . . 240
Mired in Metaphor:Which Way
Educational Reform? . . . . . . . . . 2
Mnemosyne:A Goddess for
Storytelling, Creativity, and
Reading Comprehension . . . . 151
Monroe, Carla R. . . . . . . . . . . . . . 102
National School Reform Faculty,The:
Reforming Schools from the
Inside . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 17
Nelson, Jacquelyn S. . . . . . . . . . . 121
New Gender Gap,The: Social,
Psychological, Neuro-Biological,
and Educational Perspectives . . 94
NSRF-New York . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 60
Orlando, Peter C. . . . . . . . . . . . . 151
Orlen,Vivian
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 60
Other Side of Accountability,
The . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 214
Perspectives on Education from
a Person on the Autism
Spectrum . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 229
Peterson-Veatch, Ross . . . . . . . . . . 43
Rozycki, Edward G. . . . . . 2, 136, 203
Sax, Leonard . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 190
School for the Common
Good,A . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 221
Schubert,William H. . . . . . . . . . . 130
Silva, Peggy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 29
Sitting Together at the Piano
Bench . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 43
Six Degrees of Separation:
What Teachers Need to Know
about the Emerging Science
of Sex Differences . . . . . . . . . 190
Speak, Hands (book review) . . . 130
Standards-Based Reform: Panacea
for the Twenty-First Century? . . 121
Stevens, Kathy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 87
Strengths Development Research
and Resources . . . . . . . . . . . . 157
Taking Time to Tend to the
“Good” . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 35
Teach With Your Strengths: How
Great Teachers Inspire Their
Students . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 170
Teaching Intelligent Design and
the “Bush Doctrine” . . . . . . . . 141
Teenage Behavior: It’s Not Biology,
Psychology, or Family Values . . 240
Tolivar, Carmen R. . . . . . . . . . . . . 39
View from New Orleans,The . . . 262
Welcoming the Inner Life at
School . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 247
What’s Fair? Equity in Educational
Practice . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8
Who Controls Teachers’Work?
(book review) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 69
educational HORIZONS Summer 2006
275
