Democracy's Prophet

The stern face of Horace Mann looks down from the walls of the principal's office in thousands of public schools. Almost everybody who got past the fourth grade has been pounded with such Mannly aphorisms as "Be ashamed to die until you have won some victory for humanity" and "Lost . . . two golden hours, each set with 60 diamond minutes."

Behind the portrait and the proverbs, there is a Mann whose practical accomplishments in the cause of public education in the 19th century prompted John Dewey to call him "the greatest of the American prophets of education in and for democracy." In a new biography (Until Victory: Horace Mann and Mary Peabody; Little, Brown; $5), Mrs. Louise Hall Tharp is too close to the trees of worshipfulrress to see clearly the forest of Mann's contribution. But her book is worth reading, if only as a reminder that Horace Mann was a titan in the field of educational statesmanship.

New Client. Mann grew up in a puritanical Massachusetts family. Until he was 16, he never attended school more than eight or ten weeks of any year; he was 20 before he began to prepare for college. Nevertheless, he sailed through Brown with high honors, settled down to practice law in Dedham. Mass. This led him to the legislature, where he championed a bill to establish a state board of education. When the bill became law in 1837, he left politics and a profitable legal practice to take the $1,500-a-year job as secretary of the new board, aphorizing in his diary: "Let the next generation be my client."

Public education had existed in Massachusetts since 1647, but "common schools," housed in pigsty style, were taught by underpaid ($185 a year for men, $65 for women), unqualified teachers using helter-skelter teaching methods; the well-to-do sent their children to private schools. This infuriated Mann, who believed that mass education was the key to successful self-government. "We need general intelligence and integrity," he cried. "Select schools for select children should be discarded."

Improvable Humans. In eleven years as secretary of education, Mann made Massachusetts a model for the other states. He spent $2,000,000--an enormous sum at the time--building and repairing schoolhouses, opened at least 50 new schools, gave substantial raises to teachers. He established the school year, which had averaged two or three months, at a legal minimum of six months, opened the nation's first state normal school for the training of teachers. A devout Unitarian, he championed nonsectarianism in the schools on grounds that the way a man worships God is his own business.

Mann married Mary Peabody, a sister-in-law of Nathaniel Hawthorne and a member of a family of educational pioneers, in 1843 (his first wife died in 1832 after two years of marriage). He served four years in the U.S. House of Representatives, later became president of Antioch College in Yellow Springs, Ohio and there carried his theories into the field of higher education. He died in 1859.

Mann, who believed firmly in "the improvability of the [human] race," left some words of warning for his clients of following generations:

"Republics, one after another . . . have perished through a want of intelligence and virtue in the masses of the people. They have been delivered over to anarchy and thence to despotism ... If we do not prepare children to become good citizens ... if we do not enrich their minds with knowledge, imbue their hearts with love of truth and duty and a reverence for all things sacred and holy, then our republic must go down to destruction, as others have gone before it."

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