A Contrarian View of Horace Mann (Public Schools)

Horace Mann (1796-1859) has been termed "the father of the American common school." His efforts are generally praised. From New England to California schools are named after him (and an insurance company.)

If his influence is not debatable, the basis for the praise is. History is written by the winners and most of the compliments come from public educators who, of course, benefit from his efforts. In addition there is the sheer repetition of favorable comments. As Mann himself once said, "If an idiot were to tell you the same story for a year, you would end by believing it."

In 1837 he was chosen the first Secretary to a new Commission that became the Massachusetts Board of Education, a post he held for the next dozen years. He had little real power but was very persuasive. His twelve annual reports to the legislature were widely distributed, including to foreign nations, and they are remembered and cited to this day.

Although there were many charity schools, during his years as Secretary he created an emerging public school system. It is forgotten now but his efforts faced strong opposition. The general public did not succumb easily to growing government power. Most citizens refused to attend his schools. As late at the 1880s, long after his death, Barnstable children were forced to school by the Massachusetts militia.

Perhaps because he had been a state legislator, Mann promoted his cause the way public officials often do, by overpromising and underdelivering, and telling different groups what they wanted to hear. To businessmen he argued schools would promote a stable work force. To workers he said they would promote equality. To the religious he said using the Scriptures in schools would promote moral values.

One of his most famous arguments was that "Jails and prisons are the complement of schools; so many less as you have of the latter, so many more must you have of the former." Today we have some 90,000 public schools yet jails and prisons have not disappeared. In many jurisdictions the costs of prisons are growing at a more rapid rate than those of the schools.

In his 12th and final annual report he wrote: "Education ... does better than to disarm the poor of their hostility towards the rich; it prevents being poor." There may be some truth to that for "education" but he really meant "schools," and his statement is at least debatable. Current expenditures of more than $400 billion for public schools have clearly not ended poverty, ignorance or hostility.

He also practiced incrementalism, by which government expands its role. Once established, what earlier generations vehemently opposed later generations may vehemently defend. In 1840, for example, he maintained that education (again meaning public schools) requires the consent of the people, arguing that "Enlightenment, not coercion, is our resource." A little more than a decade later, with his public school system taking root, he helped the state pass the nation's first compulsory attendance law.

Among the ironies was that while he promoted the need for a "common" school, he took little note of the segregated schools in Boston, where courts in the 1850s first upheld the doctrine of "separate but equal" facilities forty years before the U.S. Supreme Court did.

Another is that he had little formal education. Born in a small town at a time when little public schooling existed he was largely self-taught by reading in the town library. He later was accepted at Brown University and became a lawyer.

In fairness, Mann helped establish a state mental hospital, advocated free public libraries, as a Congressman opposed slavery, and ended his life as the first president of Antioch College in Ohio. He led the college in becoming the nation's first to recruit and educate women and blacks as equals. Every Antioch graduation still includes his words to the 1859 graduates, two months before his death: "Be ashamed to die until you have won some victory for humanity."

Like many reformers he believed he knew what was best and he meant well. Yet 160 years later, his unrealized promises are another example of The Law of Unintended Consequences.

Mass schooling of a compulsory nature really got its teeth into the United States between 1905 and 1915, though it was conceived of much earlier and pushed for throughout most of the nineteenth century. The reason given for this enormous upheaval of family life and cultural traditions was, roughly speaking, threefold:
1) To make good people. 2) To make good citizens. 3) To make each person his or her personal best.

These goals are still trotted out today on a regular basis, and most of us accept them in one form or another as a decent definition of public education's mission, however short schools actually fall in achieving them. But we are dead wrong. Compounding our error is the fact that the national literature holds numerous and surprisingly consistent statements of compulsory schooling's true purpose. We have, for example, the great H. L. Mencken, who wrote in The American Mercury for April 1924 that the aim of public education is not
to fill the young of the species with knowledge and awaken their intelligence. ... Nothing could be further from the truth. The aim ... is simply to reduce as many individuals as possible to the same safe level, to breed and train a standardized citizenry, to put down dissent and originality. That is its aim in the United States... and that is its aim everywhere else.
Because of Mencken's reputation as a satirist, we might be tempted to dismiss this passage as a bit of hyperbolic sarcasm. His article, however, goes on to trace the template for our own educational system back to the now vanished, though never to be forgotten, military state of Prussia. And although he was certainly aware of the irony that we had recently been at war with Germany, the heir to Prussian thought and culture, Mencken was being perfectly serious here. Our educational system really is Prussian in origin, and that really is cause for concern.
The odd fact of a Prussian provenance for our schools pops up again and again once you know to look for it. William James alluded to it many times at the turn of the century. Orestes Brownson, the hero of Christopher Lasch's 1991 book, The True and Only Heaven, was publicly denouncing the Prussianization of American schools back in the 1840s. Horace Mann's "Seventh Annual Report" to the Massachusetts State Board of Education in 1843 is essentially a paean to the land of Frederick the Great and a call for its schooling to be brought here. That Prussian culture loomed large in America is hardly surprising, given our early association with that utopian state. A Prussian served as Washington's aide during the Revolutionary War, and so many German-speaking people had settled here by 1795 that Congress considered publishing a German-language edition of the federal laws. But what shocks is that we should so eagerly have adopted one of the very worst aspects of Prussian culture: an educational system deliberately designed to produce mediocre intellects, to hamstring the inner life, to deny students appreciable leadership skills, and to ensure docile and incomplete citizens in order to render the populace "manageable."
It was from James Bryant Conant-president of Harvard for twenty years, WWI poison-gas specialist, WWII executive on the atomic-bomb project, high commissioner of the American zone in Germany after WWII, and truly one of the most influential figures of the twentieth century-that I first got wind of the real purposes of American schooling. Without Conant, we would probably not have the same style and degree of standardized testing that we enjoy today, nor would we be blessed with gargantuan high schools that warehouse 2,000 to 4,000 students at a time, like the famous Columbine High in Littleton, Colorado. Shortly after I retired from teaching I picked up Conant's 1959 book-length essay, The Child the Parent and the State, and was more than a little intrigued to see him mention in passing that the modem schools we attend were the result of a "revolution" engineered between 1905 and 1930. A revolution? He declines to elaborate, but he does direct the curious and the uninformed to Alexander Inglis's 1918 book, Principles of Secondary Education, in which "one saw this revolution through the eyes of a revolutionary."
Inglis, for whom a lecture in education at Harvard is named, makes it perfectly clear that compulsory schooling on this continent was intended to be just what it had been for Prussia in the 1820s: a fifth column into the burgeoning democratic movement that threatened to give the peasants and the proletarians a voice at the bargaining table. Modern, industrialized, compulsory schooling was to make a sort of surgical incision into the prospective unity of these underclasses. Divide children by subject, by age-grading, by constant rankings on tests, and by many other more subtle means, and it was unlikely that the ignorant mass of mankind, separated in childhood, would ever re-integrate into a dangerous whole.
Inglis breaks down the purpose - the actual purpose - of modem schooling into six basic functions, any one of which is enough to curl the hair of those innocent enough to believe the three traditional goals listed earlier:
1) The adjustive or adaptive function. Schools are to establish fixed habits of reaction to authority. This, of course, precludes critical judgment completely. It also pretty much destroys the idea that useful or interesting material should be taught, because you can't test for reflexive obedience until you know whether you can make kids learn, and do, foolish and boring things.
2) The integrating function. This might well be called "the conformity function," because its intention is to make children as alike as possible. People who conform are predictable, and this is of great use to those who wish to harness and manipulate a large labor force.
3) The diagnostic and directive function. School is meant to determine each student's proper social role. This is done by logging evidence mathematically and anecdotally on cumulative records. As in "your permanent record." Yes, you do have one.
4) The differentiating function. Once their social role has been "diagnosed," children are to be sorted by role and trained only so far as their destination in the social machine merits - and not one step further. So much for making kids their personal best.
5) The selective function. This refers not to human choice at all but to Darwin's theory of natural selection as applied to what he called "the favored races." In short, the idea is to help things along by consciously attempting to improve the breeding stock. Schools are meant to tag the unfit - with poor grades, remedial placement, and other punishments - clearly enough that their peers will accept them as inferior and effectively bar them from the reproductive sweepstakes. That's what all those little humiliations from first grade onward were intended to do: wash the dirt down the drain.
6) The propaedeutic function. The societal system implied by these rules will require an elite group of caretakers. To that end, a small fraction of the kids will quietly be taught how to manage this continuing project, how to watch over and control a population deliberately dumbed down and declawed in order that government might proceed unchallenged and corporations might never want for obedient labor.
That, unfortunately, is the purpose of mandatory public education in this country...
Against School
John Taylor Gatto
That's what school's all about, Charlie Brown.

What goes unsaid in the article is that Horace Mann was a Unitarian with a deep-seated hatred of the Catholic Church. His program to institute compulsory education in Massachusetts was intended to undermine and fragment the influence of the growing Irish Catholic community in Boston, who were immigrating to Boston in large numbers due to the potato famine. This was a continuation of the age-old conflict between the Irish Catholics and Protestant Englishmen that led to the creation of the Massachusetts Bay Colony in the first place. By forcing Catholic children to attend Protestant public schools, Mann hoped to destroy the ability of the Catholics to raise their own children as they saw fit, in accordance with the dictates of their Catholic faith. Surely, this was the beginning of the elitist attitude of the "educators" now prevalent in this country who do everything in their power to maintain control of the public school system through forced taxation and causing a double burden for those who wish to send their children to private parochial schools. Mann's intent was indoctrination, not education.

The public school movement started by Mann was the foundation of the Progressive school movement, which was escalated by the War Between The States. Northern politicians believed that by forcing the conquered Confederates to send their children to government-approved public schools with governmentally-sanctioned curricula, the tendency of the people to think for themselves that led to the "insurrection" could be destroyed. Again, the intent was indoctrination, not education.

The Blaine Act, named after Senator James Blaine (R-ME), also a Unitarian, was another step in the program of compulsory "education" to eliminate religious discourse in public schools and from our daily lives. This act codifyied the taxation formula and established a governmentally-approved curriculum that required adherence to a set of regulations which restricted religious influence in the classroom, particularly the practice of the Catholic faith.

And this was all done under the auspices of the Republican Party! This is how the Democrats began to acquire the support of the Catholic community, whose residual effects we live with to this day! The Republicans suffer under self-inflicted wounds as far as the Catholic community's support for the Democrats are concerned. It is only now changing due to the changing face of the Democrats themselves.

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