Who Invented Public School in America?

Horace Mann, the “Father of American Education,” grew up with sporadic access to schooling. Born in 1796 in Franklin, Massachusetts, he was only able to go to school for about six weeks a year during his adolescence. While some wealthy children had access to private schools and teachers, many children relied on intermittent or informal schooling, if they had any access at all. President Abraham Lincoln, born in 1809, estimated he had only about a year of schooling in total.

As an adult, Mann came to believe that democracy required a “common school” to educate students into good citizens. His fight to establish common schools in Massachusetts for all students inspired education reformers across the country, making him an influential figure in the development of the U.S. public school system.

During the 19th century, Americans interested in improving social conditions joined various reform movements. These included the abolitionist movement to end slavery, the temperance movement to promote abstinence from alcohol and the common school movement to give every child an education. Horace Mann advocated for both abolition and temperance, but he became most prominent for his role in the common school movement.

After his sporadic primary education, Mann attended Brown University in Rhode Island and Litchfield Law School in Connecticut. He then came back to Massachusetts, where he practiced law and served in the state legislature between 1827 and 1837. Mann used his position as a state lawmaker to advocate for education reform. But in 1837, he got the chance to shape his state’s education system in a bigger way. That year, Massachusetts established its Board of Education, and Mann took over as its first secretary.

For Mann, this was not merely another job in his political career, says Dallas Terry, a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Missouri who teaches political theory. Mann strongly believed that children of any race, class or gender should attend school—not just for their sake but the nation’s.

“Education was something that he saw as perhaps the social panacea for all of the wrongs that you could find in political culture,” Terry says. Mann believed the best way to deliver a good education to students was through something called the “common school.”

In the 19th century, a “common school” was comparable to today's standardized public school. Mann envisioned common schools as institutions that were free and open to all students. He wanted common schools to have education and training requirements for teachers, and he wanted those teachers to teach standardized curricula that instilled students with civic values. As a Unitarian, Mann also believed schools shouldn’t promote one sect of Christianity over others.

Mann argued that a universal education system would benefit the country. “[T]he Common School, improved and energized, as it can easily be, may become the most effective and benignant of all the forces of civilization,” Mann wrote in his final report as secretary of the Massachusetts Board of Education in 1848. Yet not everyone agreed with his vision.

Many local communities did not want their schools to follow standards set by the state. Catholic and other parochial schools in particular objected to Mann’s belief that schools should not adhere to any specific Christian sect. One of Mann’s most vocal critics was philosopher Orestes Brownson, who thought decentralized schools run by local communities and religious groups were a better model. Similar debates around private schools and homeschooling continue to this day.

Mann wasn’t able to fully implement his vision for a common school throughout Massachusetts. In his final report as secretary, he wrote that the “inherent advantages of the Common School” had produced striking results in Massachusetts despite “a system so imperfect, and an administration so feeble.” Even so, he spread his ideas to other education reformers through his 12 annual school board reports and traveling lectures around the country.

Modern scholars recognize Mann as an influential figure in the development of the U.S. public school system, while also noting the negative aspects of his legacy. One was his opposition to American Sign Language, and his insistence that deaf children learn to speak and lipread English—which for many deaf students, was neither preferable nor possible.

Mann wasn’t the only, or even the leading, proponent of “oralism”—but his support may have helped harmful educational practices for deaf students persist into the 20th century. His emphasis on English over American Sign Language stemmed from his belief that all American students, including immigrants, should speak English.

“For him, spoken English was the highest form of communication,” says Graham Warder, a history professor at Keene State College.

Other scholars have questioned Mann’s ideas about what education should do. Mann was less concerned with sparking students’ intellectual curiosity than with molding them into good citizens, says Bob Pepperman Taylor, professor emeritus of law, politics and political behavior at the University of Vermont and author of Horace Mann’s Troubling Legacy: The Education of Democratic Citizens.

“For Horace Mann, education was fundamentally moral above all else,” Taylor says.

Still, Taylor says even people who may cringe at Mann’s moralism would likely agree with his fundamental idea that schools should provide equal opportunities for all students. Though many schools still struggle to deliver equal opportunities for a variety of reasons, the fact that most Americans believe all children should receive an education is one of Mann’s legacies.