The Educational Suggestions and Achievements of Mann.—In surveying his educational positions, we find Mann’s foremost proposition was that education should Universal and free education, be universal and free. Girls should be trained as well as boys, and the poor should have the same opportunities as the rich. Public schools should furnish education of such a quality that the wealthy would not regard private institutions as superior. This universal education, however, with character as chief aim; should have as its chief aim moral character and social efficiency, and not mere erudition, culture, and accomplishments. And morality, he felt, would not be accomplished by inculcating sectarian doctrines. Mann was, however, mainly a practical, rather than a theoretical reformer, and to the material side of education he gave serious attention. He declared that school buildings should be well constructed and sanitary. material equipment, This matter seemed to him so important that he wrote a special report upon the subject during his first year in office. He carefully discussed the proper plans for rooms, ventilation, lighting, seating, and other schoolhouse features, and insisted that the inadequate and squalid conditions which existed should be improved. scientific methods, As to methods, he maintained that instruction should be based upon scientific principles, and not upon authority and tradition. He advocated the word method of reading, in the place of the uneconomical, artificial, and ineffective method of the alphabet, and the Pestalozzian object methods and oral instruction were introduced trained teachers, by him. He held that the work should be guided by able teachers, who had been trained in a normal school, and should be imparted in a spirit of mildness and kindness through an understanding of child nature. In the matter of the studies to be pursued, Mann was and practical studies. inclined to be exceedingly practical. In discussing educational values, he failed to see any reason “why algebra, a branch which not one man in a thousand ever has occasion to use in the business of life, should be studied by more than twenty-three hundred pupils, and bookkeeping, which every man, even the day laborer, should understand, should be attended to by only a little more than half that number.” Similarly, he holds that of all subjects, save the rudiments, physiology should receive the most attention.
In order that these various reforms might be realized, Mann insisted frequently that the state should spare no labor or expense. But in a republic he felt that “education can never be attained without the consent of the whole people.” It was a general elevation of ideals, effort, and expenditure that he sought, and for which he began his crusade. And the general progress that resulted in this period covers a wide range. During his Doubled appropriations for public education; increased salaries, length of the school year, and the number of high schools; secretaryship the appropriations made for public education in Massachusetts were more than doubled, and the proportion of expenditure for private schools in the state was, in consequence, reduced from seventy-five to thirty-six per cent of the total cost of education. The salaries of masters in the public schools were raised sixty-two per cent, and, although the number of women teachers had grown fifty-four per cent, the average of their salaries also increased fifty-one per cent. The school attendance enormously expanded, and a full month was added to the average school year. When Mann’s administration began, but fourteen out of forty-three towns had complied with the high school law of 1826, but, by the middle of the century, fifty new high schools had been established. The efficiency of supervision was largely increased by making the compensation of the town visiting committees, established through Carter, compulsory by law. and effected other reforms. The first state normal schools at last appeared, and teachers’ institutes, county associations, and public school libraries were given general popularity. Quite as marked was the improvement effected in the range and serviceability of the school studies, in text-books, methods of teaching, and discipline. Thus under the leadership of Horace Mann a practically unorganized set of schools, with diverse aims and methods, was welded into a well-ordered system with high ideals, and the people of Massachusetts renewed their faith in the common schools.
Henry Barnard’s Part in the Educational Awakening.—But there was another important contribution to the awakening made by a New Englander, which was of a rather different nature from that connected with the influence of Horace Mann. Before that reconstruction of the common schools, which was responsible for the best elements in our national civilization, could be at all complete, it was necessary that America should have a better comprehension of what was being done in education elsewhere. The United States had for two centuries been undergoing a gradual transition from the institutional types transplanted from England and the Continent in colonial days, and was coming more and more to blossom out into democracy and the people’s schools, but for a long time there was little knowledge of what A systematic exposition of European education needed, was being done by the other countries that had by this time adopted similar ideals. Conceptions of universal and democratic education and of improved organization and methods had been slowly developing in Prussia and other German states, and had extended to France and elsewhere. A literature connected with the advanced theories of such reformers as Rousseau, the philanthropists, Pestalozzi, and Fellenberg had likewise grown up in Europe. It was very important that America, now keenly alive to the need of educational reorganization, should become acquainted with all this, that the New World might secure the advantages of comparison, corroboration, and expansion of view from the work of older civilized peoples. Some reports on foreign education and translations of European treatises had already appeared ([pp. 304] f.), but the time was now ripe for a more extensive and systematic exposition of European education and its application to popular education in America, and for a really capable scholar to bring these and Barnard specially qualified to make it. world views within the grasp of all classes of teachers and educational authorities. This literary representative of the awakening appeared at length in Henry Barnard (1811-1900), who is fully worthy of a place in the educational pantheon of America. Barnard ([Fig. 39]) made a brilliant record at Yale for general scholarship, and a position as assistant librarian during his last two years in college did much to afford him a wide grasp of bibliography. After graduation, he obtained a valuable experience in teaching, and, by travelling extensively in America and Europe, formed a broad acquaintance with educational institutions, libraries, galleries, and social conditions in all the leading states and nations.
Fig. 37—James G. Carter
(1795-1849).
Fig. 38.—Horace Mann
(1796-1859).
Fig. 39.—Henry Barnard
(1811-1900).]
