other newspaper constantly. These the master may at first read along with them, explaining, as occasion offers, the Terms of War, and whatever else he apprehends they do not understand." This was an anticipation of one of the most recent innovations in teaching. At the present time millions of copies of dailies, weeklies, and monthlies are used in American classrooms in the study of current events, civics, and history. Yet then, as today, there were critics of American journalism and its influence. One writer held that American mediocrity was due to "the unequaled circulation of newspapers and magazines of every possible description, as well as the variety and profusion of other productions that come daily and hourly reeking from the press, " and drew the pessimistic inference that “in proportion as the facilities of learning and means of investigation are multiplied, in the same degree men seem to lose sight of more noble pursuits, and become continually more absorbed in those which only call into exercise their meaner faculties." The truth seems to have been about half-way between this harsh censure and the spread-eagleism of the writer of patriotic

Causes of the Backward State of Sound Learning of the United States, by Charles H. Lyon (1838).

geographies. But all observers admitted the fact that no social class was so high or so low as to be outside the influence of the little red schoolhouse, the blue-backed speller, and the newspaper.

CHAPTER IX

HORACE MANN AND THE AMERICAN SCHOOL

Horace Mann is by general consent the greatest educator that this western hemisphere has produced. — A. E. Winship.

HORACE MANN was the type of leader who so stamps his personality upon a great movement of reform that no one can think of it apart from him. He spent but a comparatively short period of his life in the actual work of teaching and, unlike such educational pioneers as Rousseau or Pestalozzi, he contributed no new theory or method to the science of pedagogy. Sometimes the need of the age is for a man of boundless energy, enthusiasm, and consecration who can make millions of men heed the truths already discerned by a small circle of special students. Horace Mann was the instigator, the promoter, one might almost say the press agent, of modern ideals of education.

Horace Mann was born in 1796 at Franklin, Massachusetts, and dug the only really valuable

part of his early education out of the books in the town library founded by Benjamin Franklin. Fortunately for him a private schoolmaster, Samuel Barrett, took an interest in the lad and encouraged him to go to college. Within six months he learned enough Latin and Greek to enter the sophomore class of Brown University, although up to that time he had never studied either language. This furious cramming, however, injured his health and compelled him to work for the rest of his life under a physical handicap. Indeed, it was always the habit of Mann to plunge into a task with a reckless fury that left his nerves and his temper in rags by the time the work was completed. "Work," he once said, "has always been to me what water is to a fish. I have wondered a thousand times to hear people say, 'I don't like this business'; or, 'I wish I could exchange for that'; for with me, whenever I have had anything to do, I do not remember ever to have demurred, but have always set about it like a fatalist; and it was as sure to be done as the sun is to set."

After Horace Mann graduated from college, he remained for a short time as a tutor at Brown and then took up the study of law. He outdistanced his fellow lawyers by the same grim intensity of

effort that had awed his instructors in college, and in 1827 he entered the Massachusetts Legislature. A clear pathway to political fame lay before him, the more so as he had the gift of oratory which was then valued above all others as a key to public honors. Had his career not been deflected into other channels, Massachusetts might have had in him another Webster or another Sumner, though it is safe to say that as a statesman he would have been less of an opportunist than the former and of more balanced judgment than the latter. But in 1837, when President of the State Senate, he resigned all his political prospects to accept the post of secretary to the newly created State Board of Education.

It is hard to say whether the friends of Horace Mann or the friends of the Board of Education were the more surprised and disappointed at his action. Horace Mann's friends, with few exceptions, tried to dissuade him from taking this humble office. To some who said that the position of Secretary to the Board was not one of sufficient dignity, he replied: "If the title is not sufficiently honorable now, then it is clearly left for me to elevate it; and I had rather be creditor than debtor to the title." Others, more practical, urged that it