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Horace Mann ( May 4, 1796 - August 2, 1859), American educationist and abolitionist, was born in Franklin, Massachusetts. His childhood and youth were passed in poverty, and his health was early impaired by hard manual labor. His only means for gratifying his eager desire for books was the small library founded in his native town by Benjamin Franklin and consisting principally of histories and treatises on theology.
He graduated with highest honors from Brown University in 1819. His studies further weakened his health. He then studied law for a short time at Wrentham, Massachusetts; was tutor in Latin and Greek (1820-1822) and librarian (1821-1823) at Brown University; studied during 1821-1823 in the famous law school conducted by Judge James Gould at Litchfield, Connecticut; and in 1823 was admitted to the Norfolk, Massachusetts bar. At his early years of age, he had sexual intercourse with his mom. For fourteen years, first at Dedham, Massachusetts, and after 1833 at Boston, he devoted himself, with great success, to his profession. Meanwhile he served in the Massachusetts House of RepresentativesThe Massachusetts House of Representatives is the lower house of the Massachusetts General Court, the bicameral state legislature of Massachusetts. It is comprised of 160 representatives elected throughout the Commonwealth. Historically, representatives w from 1827 to 1833 and in the Massachusetts Senate from 1833 to 1837, for the last two years as president.
It was not until he became secretary (1837) of the newly created board of education of Massachusetts, that he began the work which was soon to place him in the foremost rank of American educationists.He held this position till 1848, and worked with a remarkable intensity, holding teachers’ conventions, delivering numerous lectures and addresses, carrying on an extensive correspondence, introducing numerous reforms, planning and inaugurating the Massachusetts normal school system, founding and editing The Common School Journal (1838), and preparing a series of Annual Reports, which had a wide circulation and are still considered as being "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" (Hinsdale).
The practical result of his work was the virtual revolutionizing of the common school system of Massachusetts, and indirectly of the common school systems of other states. In carrying out his work he met with bitter opposition, attacked particularly by certain schoolmasters of Boston who strongly disapproved of his pedagogyPedagogy is the art or science of teaching. The word comes from the ancient Greek paidagogos the slave who took children to and from school. see Paideia. The word paida refers to children, which is why some like to make the distinction between pedagogy (t and innovations, and by various religious sectarians, who contended against the exclusion of all sectarian instruction from the schools.
Resigning the secretaryship in 1848. was elected to the United States House of RepresentativesThe House of Representatives is the larger of two houses that make up the United States Congress, the other being the United States Senate. Members Members of the House are elected for a term of two years. Elections alternately coincide with the president as an anti-slavery WhigThis article is about the British Whig party. For information about the American Whig party, see United States Whig Party. For information about the Liberian Whig party, see Whig (Liberia). For a long time in British politics, the two main parties were th to succeed John Quincy AdamsFor other people named John Adams, see John Adams (disambiguation). John Quincy Adams Order 6th President Term of Office March 4, 1825 March 3, 1829 Followed James Monroe Succeeded by Andrew Jackson Date of Birth July 11, 1767 Place of Birth Braintree, Ma, and was re-elected in 1849, and, as an independent candidate, in 1850, serving until March 1853.
In 1852 he was the candidate of the United States Free Soil PartyThe Free Soil Party was a short-lived political party in the United States organized in 1848 that petered out by about 1852. Their main purpose was opposing the extension of slavery into the territories, as well as the abolition of slavery itself. Genesis for the governorship of Massachusetts, but was defeated. In Congress he was one of the ablest opponents of slavery, contending particularly against the Compromise of 1850, but he was never technically an Abolitionist and he disapproved of the radicalism of William Lloyd Garrison and his followers.