Horace Mann

Who was Horace Mann?

Horace Mann was an American education reformist. As a politician he served in the Massachusetts House of Representatives from 1827 to 1833. He served in the Massachusetts Senate from 1834 to 1837. In 1848, after serving as Secretary of the Massachusetts State Board of Education since its creation, he was elected to the US House of Representatives. Mann was a brother-in-law to author Nathaniel Hawthorne.

Arguing that universal public education was the best way to turn the nation's unruly children into disciplined, judicious republican citizens, Mann won widespread approval from modernizers, especially in his Whig Party, for building public schools. Most states adopted one version or another of the system he established in Massachusetts, especially the program for "normal schools" to train professional teachers. Mann has been credited by educational historians as the "Father of the Common School Movement".

Famous Quotes:

• When a child can be brought to tears, and not from fear of punishment, but from repentance he needs no chastisement. When the tears begin to flow from the grief of their conduct you can be sure there is an angel nestling in their heart.
• Unfaithfulness in the keeping of an appointment is an act of clear dishonesty. You may as well borrow a person's money as his time.
• It is well to think well. It is divine to act well.
• Habit is a cable; we weave a thread of it each day, and at last we cannot break it.
• Education is our only political safety. Outside of this ark all is deluge.
• Education, then, beyond all other devices of human origin, is the great equalizer of the conditions of men -- the balance-wheel of the social machinery.
• It is more difficult, and it calls for higher energies of soul, to live a martyr than to die one.
• Every addition to true knowledge is an addition to human power.
• If any man seeks for greatness, let him forget greatness and ask for truth, and he will find both.
• A teacher who is attempting to teach without inspiring the pupil with a desire to learn is hammering on a cold iron.