from The Common School Journal

Horace Mann

Horace Mann (1796–1859) is often called the “father of American Public Education,” because of his strong support for publicly funded schools. He was the first secretary of the Massachusetts Board of Education, a position from 1837 to 1848. Mann is particularly noted for his contributions to the Common School Journal, which he founded and edited, and from which this excerpt is taken. In addition to holding the post of secretary of the Board of Education, Mann was at different times in his life a tutor, college librarian, lawyer, and state legislator.

KEY CONTEXT Mann once said, “Be ashamed to die until you have won some victory for humanity,” which is now the motto of Antioch College, of which Mann was the first president. As you read, keep in mind that this excerpt is from 1842, and the United States was still a newly formed, largely rural and agrarian country. There was not yet widespread agreement on the need for education for all citizens, especially for children of lower socioeconomic status. It was not until the 1920s that more than half of the teenage population even attended high school. The question that Mann tries to answer here is: why is school important to the individual as well as society?

Mankind are rapidly passing through a transition state. The idea and feeling that the world was made, and life given, for the happiness of all, and not for the ambition, or pride, or luxury, of one, or of a few, are pouring in, like a resistless tide, upon the minds of men, and are effecting a universal revolution in human affairs. Governments, laws, social usages, are rapidly dissolving, and recombining in new forms. The axiom which holds the highest welfare of all the recipients of human existence to be the end and aim of that existence, is the theoretical foundation of all the governments of this Union; it has already modified all the old despotisms of Europe, and has obtained a foothold on the hitherto inaccessible shores of Asia and Africa, and the islands of the sea. A new phrase, — the people, — is becoming incorporated into all languages and laws; and the correlative idea of human rights is evolving, and casting off old institutions and customs, as the expanding body bursts and casts away the narrow and worn-out garments of childhood.

In all the towns in our Common wealth, — in the small and obscure, and perhaps still more in cities and in other populous places, — there are many children, — orphans, or those who, in the curse of vicious parentage, suffer a worse evil than orphanage, — children doomed to incessant drudgery, and who, from the straitened circumstances of the household, from awkwardness of manners, or indigence in dress, never emerge from their solitude and obscurity, and therefore necessarily grow up with all the coarseness, narrowness, prejudices, and bad manners, almost inseparable from spending the years of non-age in entire seclusion from the world. This is a true picture of the condition of many children in every town in the State. Although there may be a few exceptions, in regard to sons, as to the effects which these misfortunes of birth and parentage tend to produce, yet there are scarcely any such exceptions in regard to daughters. At the age of sixteen or eighteen, a vigorous-minded boy may break away from the dark hovel where his eyes first saw the light, and go abroad in quest of better fortunes; but there is hardly any such option in regard to girls. As a general rule, they will remain at home, until, perhaps, the relation of marriage is entered into with some individual of fortunes similar to their own, when it will become their turn to rear up children after the model which was furnished in their own degraded and degrading birthplace.

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Now, in the common course of events, and without the instrumentality of schools, this class of children, during the whole period of their minority, would never be brought into communication or acquaintance with a single educated, intelligent, benevolent individual, — with one who loves children with a wise and forecasting love, — with one whose manners are refined, whose tastes and sentiments are pure and elevating, — who can display the beauty and excellence of knowledge, and win others to obtain what they cannot fail to admire. The most which this class of children would be likely to see of any educated men, would be when the clergyman should make his brief annual parochial call, or when the physician should be summoned to administer to diseases brought on by ignorance or improper indulgences, or when they should be carried before the courts to answer for offences which their untaught and unchastened passions had prompted them to commit. But let a company of well-educated, well-trained, devoted teachers be sent into the school districts of the Commonwealth, to hold intercourse and communion with these children, week after week and month after month, — let their qualities of knowledge, dignity, kindness, purity, and refinement, be brought to act upon the ignorance, vulgarity, squalidness, and obscenity, of these neglected and perverted beings, — and how inexpressibly beautiful it would be to see the latter gradually enlightened, purified, and humanized, by the benignant influences of the former, — to see them casting off not only the foul exuviae¹ of the surface, but the deeper impurities of the soul! By wise precepts, by patterns and examples of what is good and great in human character, how many of them may be led to admire, to reverence, and then to imitate! O, how beautiful and divine the work by which the jungles of a society that calls itself civilized, can be cleared from the harpies, the wild beasts, and the foul creeping things which now dwell therein! This is the work of civilization and Christianity; and it is time that those who call upon us to send our wealth to other lands should bestow a thought upon the barbarism and heathenism around their own doors. It is time that the current of public sentiment should be changed on another point, and that the honor and glory of a people should be held to consist in the general prevalence of virtue and intelligence, rather than in the production of a few splendid examples of genius and knowledge. In the great march of society, it is rather our duty to bring up the rear than to push forward the van.