Horace Mann, Oh How Little Has Changed...

EDU 6120 Week 7

Horace Mann’s commitment and ideology to the social and economic benefits of education laid the foundation for Common Schools in Massachusetts in the late 1830s and later inspired the nation to endeavor into the social transformation made possible through public education. It is empowering to read his words that still guide our thinking about social responsibility today. His deduction that education is the essential communal lever for social transformation is revealing as we still wrestle with these questions 170 years later. He queried, “To what extent can competence displace pauperism?” That is, can education of the masses lead to the eradication of poverty? He further inquires, “How nearly can we free ourselves from the low-minded and vicious, not by their expatriation, but by their elevation?” Here he muses, might the democratic state try to educate rather than simply cast aside or literally expel the ‘dead weight’ of society?

Mann’s democratic ideals and the belief in individual capacity and liberty are evident. I appreciate that he uses the larger economic realities of Massachusetts to assert his argument. He states, “by its [Massachusetts] industrial condition, and its business operation, it is exposed far beyond any other State in the Union to the fatal extremes of overgrown wealth and desperate poverty.” By recognizing the growing dual economy and disparate “haves” and “have-nots,” Mann compels Massachusetts to consider the responsibility to its citizens and the inevitable improvements, the result of an educated populace.

And although I am indebted to Mann for his argumentation and practical work that built of foundation for public schools in America, there are a few places where his assertions may have been too extreme in the belief that education was THE answer. He writes, “nothing but universal education can counterwork this tendency of domination of capital and the servility of labor.” Really? nothing? What about actually having groceries stores in urban neighborhoods to eradicate urban food deserts? What about more equitable fair housing policy? How about infrastructural developments like public parks and better roads and public transit for cities and suburbs? Maybe even ending a federally induced War on Drugs that has conflated the public health issues of addiction with felonies and buoyed the prison industrial complex by disproportionately locking up brown and black boys – instead of actually educating them. It would seem that such policy concerns today are just as pressing as education access and reform.

Mann’s ideology even supposed that education “does better than to disarm the poor of their hostility toward the rich: it prevents being poor.” This is sadly not so. Although public American education has done much to level the playing fields for opportunity, where race and sex are concerned (which are not yet equal or equitable), capitalism has still won the day. We needn’t look any further than the Occupy movement to recognize that class issues and income inequality are as stark as ever in our country. Public education has failed to close this gap. What’s more, the biggest boom of America’s middle class where arguably the greatest number of average Americans made the greatest gains both in terms of owning stuff (yay consumerism) and also generational wealth (yay living wages and retirement accounts) was the result of the post-WWII economy and not thanks to public education.

I think it is important to take Mann’s ideology to task considering so many of us are still wed to it. Rampant today are the public perceptions about the democratic import of public education that delude us to see education as THE panacea or at the very least, THE ONLY setting or medium, for improving social and economic ills. This has placed an undue burden on teachers and administrators by broadening the scope and weakening the impact of public schools. Moreover, it has driven arbitrary high stakes accountability measures so the public can annually quantify and measure its return on investment.

Now, I recognize that I am not being entirely fair to Horace. And honestly, from what I have read about the man, I think he’d be shocked at the present state our nation. Many of the political issues I raised and as well as the scope of my critique are anachronistic at least as far as Mann was aware. Yet, as I look around, so little about our system has changed since his time especially Mann’s proposals about how we should value and construct public education. Both ideologically and practically, our common school system is frighteningly similar to Mann’s time. Why are we still grouping kids by age? Uniform periods each course getting the same amount of minutes? Why for that matter are we still siloing content into discrete subjects? And why have we stayed wed to the physical structures of schools? Why use one room with desks all facing the same direction where one adult manages anywhere from 20-40 children? I think that someone like Mann, who clearly believed in society and the responsibilities therein would have an easier time figuring out what a smartphone is and how to use it than he would understanding why we’ve hardly augmented his schoolhouse model. Were he here today, he’d be on the front lines with us demanding reform.