In 1836, Horace Mann was elected President of the Massachusetts Senate.  During his legislative service, Mann was particularly interested and active in humanitarian measures related to social welfare.  When the time came for a great personality to lead the cause of free public education, Mann was prepared.  He had the character, the training, the public confidence, and the devotion and he responded to the call.

 

In 1837, while he was serving as Senate President, the State created the Massachusetts Board of Education.  The duties of the board were to collect school information, study educational methods, disseminate facts and ideas, give advice and serve as a state clearing house on education. Mann was offered the position of the board’s first secretary to act as its executive officer and agent.  At first he was hesitant. The position offered little promise, was of slight honor and offered barely a living wage of $1,000 per year.  His decision would change history.

 

As noted by Hugh Nixon of the Massachusetts Teachers Association in an article written in May 1960: “…Mann, ever since early youth, had a passionate desire to serve humanity in some great way.  He was a reformer and humanitarian by nature.  Here was a great opportunity to do something fine and good in a field which called for a courageous pioneer who would blaze trails.  He accepted the challenge of the appointment with the fervor and determination of a crusader, to begin a service which makes him one of the greatest Americans of all time.”

 

Upon taking on the newly found role with the Massachusetts Board of Education, Mann withdrew from all other professional or business engagements as well as from politics. Awed by the immensity of the challenge of his new post, Mann swore to himself on the day he accepted, “Henceforth, as long as I hold this office, I dedicate myself to the supremest welfare of mankind on earth.”  Over the next twelve years he transformed the state’s hodgepodge of charity schools for the poor into a great system of free public schools, organized on solid educational principles.  His central thesis was essentially – no republic can endure unless its citizens are literate and educated.  

 

This led him to become the most prominent national spokesman for that position.  He worked with a remarkable intensity, holding teacher’s conventions, delivering numerous lectures and addresses, producing extensive correspondence and introducing reforms. In the United States of the 1830s, arguing for a common school that is commonly supported, commonly attended by all people regardless of race, class or sex, and commonly controlled – was a radical idea.

 

Mann traveled to every school district in the state so he could physically examine each school ground. He opened the first normal school system in Lexington, which soon moved to Framingham.  He opened another two schools in the state and began a series of annual reports to the board of education, which were considered “among the best expositions, if, indeed, they are not the very best ones, of the practical benefits of a common school education both to the individual and to the state”.  He advocated for the disuse of corporal punishments as part of school discipline.  Each in this series of annual reports became published as part of Horace Mann’s life’s work.