Horace Mann

Horace Mann, Antioch College’s first president, was a renowned educator, architect of the American Public School System, social reformer and abolitionist.  His goal was to create an educational environment that was stimulating and unconventional in its approach to learning.

The Antioch today is the legacy of Horace Mann’s original vision, and an example of the success of educational experimentation, innovation and diversity of thought.  Antioch continues to break down educational barriers and rebuild them as educational opportunities. 

 

Biography

Horace Mann, ardent abolitionist, social reformer, and visionary educator, was the founding President of Antioch College (1853-59). Born in Massachusetts in a Calvinist small town, Mann (1796-1859) had little formal education as a youth, but read extensively at the town library, where he learned enough to be admitted to Brown University.

After graduation in 1819 he taught for a while, studied law and then entered politics, where he soon became a rising star in the state assembly (1827-37). During this period, Mann was instrumental in the enactment of laws prohibiting the sale of alcohol, establishing state mental institutions, and in 1835, he cast his vote in favor of creating the nation's first state education board. He then shocked family and friends by taking the job of the first secretary to that body, the Massachusetts Commission to Improve Education (later the State Board of Education), an agency with no money or control over local schools.

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 Jeffersonian--no republic can endure unless its citizens are literate and educated. In the United States of the 1830s, arguing for "common school"-- that is, a school commonly supported, commonly attended by all people regardless of race, class or sex, and commonly controlled -- was a radical idea. Some would say it still is!

(Source: www.phd.antioch.edu/Pages/horacemann )