Horace Mann: Father Of Common School Movement

Major Educator Project of Horace Mann

Overview

Horace Mann is well known as the Father of Common School Movement. He disputed that the universal public education is the essential method to educate the young children in the country as prudent republican citizens. He widespread the construction of the public school and established the program called ‘normal schools’ to train teachers to be a professionals. This is the reason why he is credited as the “Father of the Common School Movement” after all.

Early Life Education

Mann was born on May 4, 1796, in Franklin, Massachusetts. He was one of the five children under his father who was a farmer with no much money. The poor circumstance of the family taught him the habits of self-reliance and independence from the young age. With his circumstances, it was more than obvious that he did not get much of an education. Since he only had about six weeks of education during each year, he used the town library to continuing his study by himself. He confessed that “resolve to edge in a little reading everyday, if it is but a single sentence. If you gain fifteen minutes a day, it will make itself felt at the end of the year” about what the self-education could do in his book later. However, although it is true that self-teaching could have some amount of accomplishment the need of professional education by professional teachers was needed publically. This lack of education he got and thirst for learning were one of the significant factors that influenced him to lead the Common School Movement in his later part of life. Then, he went to the Brown University at the age of 20. He graduated his school in the year of 1819 as the valedictorian of his class with the speech called “The Progressive Ch...

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...roductive, and responsible citizens that a proper civic education should teach basic principles of government, provide insights into representative institutions, and generally from good citizens.” Once again, he believed that in order to build a society that has responsible citizens, the fastest way is to have a good civic education to equip the children with such values. Since they do not have the definite worldview, it is easy to manipulate them in a good way. Lastly, he wanted the common school to do “a delicate political balancing act to cultivate a general political consciousness but not indoctrinate students in partisan political ideology” by believing that the school could perform “its civic, political, and cultural roles in a nonpartisan way.” So once again, he believed that common school has and is able to be a foundation to change the society after all.