Horace Mann

Welcome to Did You Know, a video series about Massachusetts, where we take a look at interesting tidbits of state history. Each video will cover a different part of Massachusetts history and culture. Today, our topic is prominent politician and educator Horace Mann. Did you know that Horace Mann reformed the public school system into what it is today? Let's find out more.

Hausmann was a state senator, state representative, U.S. representative and lawyer, but is best known for his pioneering work on the Massachusetts Board of Education. There he promoted a new system of public education that was fully nonsectarian and based on developing the character of children. Today, we will learn about Horace.

Horace Mann was born on May 4th, 1796, in Franklin, Massachusetts. His family was made up of poor farmers. So Horace was only able to go to school six weeks out of the year for most of his childhood. He studied on his own using the Franklin Public Library and attended Brown University, where he graduated as valedictorian in 1819. In 1830, Mann married his first wife, Charlotte Messer, who was the daughter of Brown University's president.

She died two years later, and Mann never fully recovered from this loss. He studied law at Litchfield Law School before being admitted to the bar in 1823. Mann's political career started in 1827, when he was elected to the Massachusetts legislature as the representative for Dedham, where he helped revise and edit state statutes during his three terms in office.

He moved to Boston in 1833 and became a state senator in 1835. He served from 1836 to 1837 as Senate president, where he focused on improving and promoting state will vote. Established Worcester State Hospital, the first mental asylum in the state, and wrote laws promoting temperance. In 1837, Governor Edward Everett suggested the creation of a Board of Education to improve state schooling to the legislature based on the passage of an 1836 law in Congress that distributed $37.5 million among states.

Massachusetts was awarded about $1.8 million or $48 billion today, and this surplus meant more funds could be appropriated to various state projects, including the proposed Board of Education. While citizens were required by law to support public schools financially, teachers lacked formal training, decreasing the quality of the education they provided. Schools at the time also grounded their teachings in religion and required towns of more than 50 families to hire and pay teachers to educate children on the scriptures.

Wealthy families sent their children to private schools and academies, leading to a lack of resources for public pauper schools, which lacked standardized teaching materials and were often housed in poorly constructed buildings. By the time Mann entered the Massachusetts House, the poor quality of public schools compared to private ones was well known, and the state legislature was already considering training teachers to remedy this state of affairs.

After the Board of Education was established by law in 1837 with Governor Everett as chairman, Maine was appointed its first secretary and threw himself into his new role, stepping down from his position as Senate president. He vote 12 annual reports on education reform, spoke at school conventions, visited over 800 schools in every county in the state, gave speeches to teachers and politicians, and worked to promote a new system of publicly funded elementary education.

Maine's proposed system calls for free public education that accepted children from all backgrounds was nonsectarian or not bound to any particular religious doctrine and was taught by trained teachers. To educate these teachers, Maine helped found publicly funded more and more schools to train them. Starting with Lexington Normal School in 1839, originally located in Lexington, Massachusetts, Maine also promoted an end to corporal punishment in schools and for women to work as teachers, believing that they were better suited for teaching than men.

Men also used his writings to interest local school boards and community members and the importance of free public schools and encourage them to support the reforms he proposed in their own cities and towns. In 1843, Mann married his second wife, Mary Tyler Peabody, a teacher at me and secretary, and they had three children Horace Mann, Junior, George Combe.

MANN and Benjamin Peck, man. During Mann's honeymoon, he and Mary took a trip to Europe and Prussia to visit schools and compare their teaching standards to the United States. He published his findings in the board's annual reports of founding Additional normal schools in BAA in 1838 and Bridgwater in 1840. In later years, the Lexington Normal School moved to Framingham and the Bar School to Westfield.

Today, these three schools are state universities Framingham State University, Westfield State University and Bridgewater State University, respectively. However, being faced opposition for his educational reforms by parents who did not want teachers to take over moral education, poor families who relied on the income of their children's labor to survive, and teachers who disagreed with me teaching reforms and objected to his mandate of an education that was not based on faith, may encounter these claims by arguing that free education available to all children would make them good citizens and that nonsectarian schooling would cover basic Christian morals without endorsing a particular church.

Made to believe that giving children a strong education would a waste an individual's personal flaws, including ignorance, poverty, sloth and greed. In 1848, man was elected to the US Congress as a representative to fill the vacancy of John Quincy Adams. After his death, that February man, a member of the Whig Party, opposed slavery and was opposed to longtime Massachusetts Senator and lawyer Daniel Webster.

Support for the compromise of 1850, which included a fugitive slave law that required officials in any state to support returning escaped slaves to their masters. During debate over the compromise, Webster made a speech criticizing Northerners and Southerners for stirring up tensions over slavery, which brought him fierce criticism by abolitionists, including man who compared him to Lucifer, descending from heaven while Maynard was defeated for reelection as a Whig that year.

He campaigned as an independent anti-slavery candidate and won back his seat, serving until 1853. In September, 1850, two men was nominated for Governor of Massachusetts and offered the presidency of Antioch College in Yellow Springs, Ohio. On the same day after losing the governor's election, Mann accepted the college presidency and served there until his death. NTR College was one of the first schools open to men, women and people of color and Men was a popular professor there teaching economics, philosophy and theology while giving public lectures

However, he was involved in religious struggles at the college as the religious group that founded it. The Christian Connection withdrew its financial support, causing bitter infighting. Despite the difficulties, men continue to champion for public education and hired his niece, Rebecca Pannell, as the first female college faculty member to be paid equally to her male colleagues. In 1859, men gave a famous commencement speech at Antioch asking graduates to be ashamed to die until you have won a victory for humanity.

Shortly after the ceremony, man collapsed and he died on August 2nd, 1859. He is remembered as a prominent educational performer whose methods continued to be used today during in-person and virtual instruction. Horace Mann statue stands in front of the Massachusetts State House today, next to the statue of Daniel Webster. This statue was sculpted by Emma Stebbins, the first woman to receive a public commission from New York City in 1865.

Horace Mann's portrait, painted by Arthur Pico in 1972, is featured in the Senate Reception room of the building. Mann's teaching reforms were adopted by many states, including Massachusetts, during his life and continue to inspire educators today. Thanks for joining me to learn about Horace Mann. If you'd like to know more, check out these resources. Thank you for watching.