All over the world schools are named for Horace Mann. Not merely because he was the first Secretary of the Massachusetts Board of Education, and not just because he was the first president of Antioch College, has he been called "The Father of American Public Education."
Mann's importance springs from his two guiding principles: that free public education for everyone-regardless of race, sex, religion, and economic class-should be the best possible to develop each student's individuality; and that since schools are no better than the teachers working in them, teachers must be as well trained as possible a hard, unpleasant New England boyhood and a desperate struggle to win his own education taught Mann the value of his two guiding principles.
Horace Mann was 41 years old when he became Secretary of the first Massachusetts Board of Education in 1837. He was already a successful lawyer and had what promised to be a brilliant political future ahead of him. His friends called him foolish for giving up these careers, but abandon them he did. Earlier as a member of the Massachusetts legislature, he had reformed the treatment of the insane, worked for the relief of honest debtors, for the regulation of the sale of liquor, and to maintain the separation of church and state in Massachusetts. From 1848 to 1852, he served in Congress, where he attacked slavery. But always education-making better schools, training better teachers-was his working dream.
In 1853 Mann went West to become the first president of Antioch College. Again his friends thought him foolish. But in the six years before he died, Horace Mann fought to establish the same democratic educational principles at Antioch that he had established in the public schools of Massachusetts.
Mann wrote 12 Annual Reports as Secretary that transformed public education not only in Massachusetts and throughout the United States but all over the world. He founded libraries and normal schools to train teachers. Mann's living monument is the unbroken chain of students and teachers he taught to live as free citizens in a democracy.
—from the book
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