The common school movement has long constituted one of the defining themes and primary focal points of scholarship in the history of American education. Although this push toward a tax-supported, universal public education was a national movement, no state has been as closely identified with it as Massachusetts, and no individual recognized as taking a more important lead in the dissemination of common school ideology than Horace Mann. The region and the person, so closely linked with each other, were both crucial in advancing the common school cause throughout the nation and in stamping it into the American historical and cultural fabric. In his seminal Twelfth Annual Report as the Secretary of the Massachusetts State Board of Education, Mann articulated a vision of the common school that served as a powerful inspiration to reformers in other regions of the United States. He wrote that the Massachusetts system of common schools "knows no distinction of rich and poor, of bond and free, or between those who, in the imperfect light of this world, are seeking, through different avenues, to reach the gate of heaven. Without money and without price, it throws open its doors, and spreads the table of its bounty, for all the children of the State. Like the sun, it shines, not only upon the good, but upon the evil, that they may become good; and, like the rain, its blessings descend, not only upon the just, but upon the unjust, that their injustice may depart from them and be known no more.''1 This passage strongly conveys the rhetorical nature of much of common school ideology, reflecting the reformist, optimistic, and ultimately political impulses that characterized much of the educational thought in the United States during the mid-nineteenth century. As rhetoric, com