(May 4, 1796–August 2, 1859), was an American legislator and educator. He played a leading role establishing the public school system in the United States. As a lawyer, Horace Mann served in the Massachusetts legislature as a state representative, 1827–33, and as a state senator, 1833–37. In 1848, he became a U.S. Representative and strongly fought to end slavery in America.
Horace Mann was known for being the Secretary of the Massachusetts State Board of Education; founding the first state normal school in the United States in 1839; and being the president of Antioch College in Ohio. In 1900, he was elected to New York University’s Hall of Fame. Horace Mann stated:
Moral education is a primal necessity of social existence. The unrestrained passions of men are not only homicidal, but suicidal; and a community without a conscience would soon extinguish itself. Even with a natural conscience, how often has evil triumphed over good.2107
In 1843, as Secretary of Education in Massachusetts, Mann studied the educational system of Prussia. Five years later, in 1848, at the Twelfth Annual Report of the Massachusetts Board of Education, Horace Mann made the following statement:
Now, it is the especial province and function of the statesman and the lawgiver—of all those, indeed, whose influence molds or modifies public opinion—to study out the eternal principles which conduce to the strength, wisdom, and righteousness of a community. …
And he is not worthy to be called a statesman, he is not worthy to be a lawgiver or leader among men, who, either through the weakness of his head or the selfishness of his heart, is incapable of marshaling in his mind the great ideas of knowledge, justice, temperance, and obedience to the laws of God,—on which foundation alone the structure of human welfare can be erected; who is not capable of organizing these ideas into a system, and then of putting that system into operation.2108
Horace Mann, in the Twelfth Annual report to the Massachusetts Board of Education, recommended:
But to all doubters, disbelievers, or dispairers in human progress, it may still be said, there is one experiment which has never yet been tried. It is an experiment, which even before its inception, offers the highest authority for its ultimate success.
Its formula is intelligible to all; and it is as legible as though written in starry letters on an azure sky. It is expressed in these few and simple words: “Train up a child in the way he should go and when he is old he will not depart from it.”
This declaration is positive. If the conditions are complied with, it makes no provision for a failure. … But it will be said that this grand result in practical morals is a consummation of blessedness that can never be attained without religion, and that no community will ever be religious without a religious education.
Both these propositions I regard as eternal and immutable truths. Devoid of religious principles and religious affections, the race can never fall so low but that it may sink still lower; animated and sanctified by them, it can never rise so high but that it may ascend still higher.
And is it not at least as presumptuous to expect that mankind will attain to the knowledge of truth, without being instructed in truth, and without that general expansion and development of faculty which will enable them to recognize and comprehend truth in any other department of human interest as in the department of religion.
If I were able to give but one parting word of advise to my own children, or to the children of others; if I were sinking beneath the wave, and had time to utter but one articulate breath; or were wasting away upon the deathbed, and had strength to make but one exhortation more,—that dying legacy should be, “Remember thy Creator in the days of thy youth.”2109
In the Twelfth Annual Report, Horace Mann continued:
So the religious education which a child receives at school is not imparted to him for the purposes of making him join this or that denomination when he arrives at years of discretion, but for the purpose of enabling him to judge for himself, according to the dictates of his own reason and conscience, what his religious obligations are, and whither they lead.
The Bible is in our common schools by common consent. … In all my intercourse for twelve years, whether personal of by letter, with all the school officers in the state, and with tens of thousands of individuals in it, I have never heard an objection made to the use of the Bible in school, except in one or two instances; and, in those cases, the objection was put upon the ground that daily familiarity with the book in school would tend to impair a reverence for it.2110
In his report, Horace Mann emphasized:
That our public schools are not theological seminaries, is admitted. That they are debarred by law from inculcating the peculiar and distinctive doctrines of any one religious denomination amongst us, is claimed; and that they are also prohibited from ever teaching that what they teach is the whole of religion, or all that is essential to religion or to salvation, is equally certain.
But our system earnestly inculcated all Christian morals; it founds its morals on the basis of religion; it welcomes the religion of the Bible; and, in receiving the Bible, it allows it to do what it is allowed to do in other systems—to speak for itself. …
I hold it, then, to be one of the excellences, one of the moral beauties, of the Massachusetts system, that there is one place in the land where the children of all the different denominations are brought together for instruction, where the Bible is allowed to speak for itself; one place where the children can kneel at a common altar, and feel that they have a common Father, and where the services of religion tend to create brothers, and not Ishmaelites.2111
In concluding his report to the Massachusetts Board of Education, Horace Mann offered the evidence:
It was in consequence of laws that invaded the direct and exclusive jurisdiction which our Father in Heaven exercises over his children upon earth, that the Pilgrims fled from their native land to that which is the land of our nativity. They sought a residence so remote and so inaccessible, in hopes that the prerogatives of the Divine Magistrate might no longer be set at nought by the usurpations of the civil power.
Was it not an irreligious and an impious act on the part of the British government to pursue our ancestors with such cruel penalties and privations as to drive them into banishment? Was it not a religious and pious act in the Pilgrim Fathers to seek a place of refuge where the arm of earthly power could neither restrain them from worshiping God in the manner believed to be most acceptable to him, nor command their worship in a manner believed to be unacceptable? And if it was irreligious for our forefathers two centuries ago, then it is more flagrantly irreligious to repeat the oppression in this more enlightened age of the world.
If it was a religious act in our forefathers to escape from ecclesiastical tyranny, then it must be in the strictest conformity to religion for us to abstain from all religious oppression over others, and to oppose it whenever it is threatened.
And this abstinence from religious oppression, this acknowledgement of the rights of others, this explicit recognition and avowal of the supreme and exclusive jurisdiction of Heaven, and this denial of the right of any earthly power to encroach upon that jurisdiction, is precisely what the Massachusetts school-system purports to do in theory and what it does actually in practice.
Hence I infer that our system is not an irreligious one, but is in the strictest accordance with religion and its obligations.2112
In his last public statement, Horace Mann exclaimed:
Be ashamed to die until you have won some victory for humanity.2113