![]() The result was the establishment in 1837 of a state board of education, charged with collecting and publicizing school information throughout the state. A vigorous reform movement arose, committed to halting this decline by reasserting the state’s influence. Yet during Mann’s own lifetime, the quality of education had deteriorated as school control had gradually slipped into the hands of economy-minded local districts. Nineteenth-century Massachusetts could boast a public school system going back to 1647. Of the many causes Mann espoused, none was dearer to him than popular education. In 1833 he moved to Boston, and from 1835 to 1837 he served in the Massachusetts Senate, of which he was president in 1836. There he led the movement that established a state hospital for the insane at Worcester, the first of its kind in the United States. He settled in Dedham, Massachusetts, and there his legal acumen and oratorical skill soon won him a seat in the state House of Representatives, where he served from 1827 to 1833. He read law briefly with a Wrentham, Massachusetts, lawyer, taught for a year at Brown, and then studied at Litchfield (Connecticut) Law School, which led to his admission to the bar in 1823. Upon graduation in 1819 Mann chose law as a career. He did brilliant work at Brown, manifesting great interest in problems of politics, education, and social reform his valedictory address, on the gradual advancement of the human race in dignity and happiness, was a model of humanitarian optimism, offering a way in which education, philanthropy, and republicanism could combine to allay the wants and shortcomings that beset humankind. He was taught briefly and erratically by comparatively poor teachers, but he managed to educate himself in the Franklin town library, and, with tutoring in Latin and Greek from Samuel Barrett (later a leading Unitarian minister), he gained admission at the age of 20 to the sophomore class at Brown University (Providence, Rhode Island). Mann grew up in an environment ruled by poverty, hardship, and self-denial. Horace Mann, (born May 4, 1796, Franklin, Massachusetts, U.S.-died August 2, 1859, Yellow Springs, Ohio), American educator, the first great American advocate of public education who believed that, in a democratic society, education should be free and universal, nonsectarian, democratic in method, and reliant on well-trained professional teachers. ![]()
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