PBS Online: Only A Teacher: Schoolhouse Pioneers (2024)

Mann's commitment to the Common School sprang from his belief that political stability and social harmony depended on education: a basic level of literacy and the inculcation of common public ideals. He declared, "Without undervaluing any other human agency, it may be safely affirmed that the Common School...may become the most effective and benignant of all forces of civilization." Mann believed that public schooling was central to good citizenship, democratic participation and societal well-being. He observed, "A republican form of government, without intelligence in the people, must be, on a vast scale, what a mad-house, without superintendent or keepers, would be on a small one." The democratic and republican principals that propelled Mann's vision of the Common School have colored our assumptions about public schooling ever since.

Mann was influential in the development of teacher training schools and the earliest attempts to professionalize teaching. He was not the first to propose state-sponsored teacher training institutes (James Carter had recommended them in the 1820s), but, in 1838, he was crucial to the actual establishment of the first Normal Schools in Massachusetts. Mann knew that the quality of rural schools had to be raised, and that teaching was the key to that improvement. He also recognized that the corps of teachers for the new Common Schools were most likely to be women, and he argued forcefully (if, by contemporary standards, sometimes insultingly) for the recruitment of women into the ranks of teachers, often through the Normal Schools. These developments were all part of Mann's driving determination to create a system of effective, secular, universal education in the United States.

Mann, Horace.

Annual Reports on Education, 1872
Massachusetts System of Common Schools, 1849