Horace Mann, father of American public schools, taught his own children at home
Horace Mann persuaded Massachusetts and then most northern states to fund elementary schools through taxes and to train teachers in normal schools. Yet the reformer later called the Father of American Education home schooled his own three sons, and his favoured reading method did not deliver what he promised.
Born in Franklin, Massachusetts, on May 4, 1796, Mann had no more than six weeks of schooling in any year between ten and twenty, leaning instead on the town library, the first public library in America. He entered Brown University at 20 and graduated as valedictorian in 1819, then became a lawyer, a state legislator from 1827 and president of the Massachusetts Senate.
In 1837 he became secretary of the new Massachusetts Board of Education and dropped all other work. He visited every school in the state, founded The Common School Journal in 1838, opened the first state normal schools and travelled to Prussia in 1843 at his own expense to study its classrooms. To win over businessmen facing new taxes, he argued that a better educated workforce made the economy richer. He also pushed to end corporal punishment and, with Catharine Beecher, to bring more women into teaching.
Mann believed common schools mixing children of every class would equalise the conditions of men and build character alongside literacy. His schools barred teaching the distinct doctrines of any one denomination, drawing fire from sectarians, though he insisted the Bible was still allowed to speak for itself in class. A believer in phrenology, he thought education could offset biological flaws.
He despised the alphabet method, calling letters skeleton-shaped, bloodless, ghostly apparitions, and favoured teaching whole words. By 1890 the alphabet method had nearly vanished, but illiteracy stayed high: about a quarter of American soldiers in the First World War could not read or write. Mann served in Congress from 1848 to 1853 and led Antioch College from 1852 until his death on August 2, 1859.
Source: Horace Mann
