Perfecting Childhood: Horace Mann and the Origins of Public Education in the United States

Abstract

Linking life experiences and social changes, this essay focuses on Horace Mann's early educational experiences in New England as the source of a vision of public education so persuasive as to form the intellectual and moral scaffolding on which public education would be built and the lives of the young irreversibly altered.

Education Historians as Mythmakers

“…As a result of explorations of the role of community in educational history, schools acquire new dimensions and emerge as powerful structures of persuasion mediating between the increasingly differentiated worlds of men and women, young and old, parent and child, and household and work site. They appear as protracted grouplearning settings within which teacher culture, youth culture, work culture, and the culture of the book form important new forms of human association, ways of seeing, feeling, believing, and knowing (Aries, 1962;Biklen, 1990;Calhoun, 1973;deMause, 1974;Finkelstein, 1986Finkelstein, , 1990Hamilton, 1980). Schools become institutions that cultivate identity, creating boundaries between groups, forging social bonds, evoking meaning, compelling allegiance, and exacting commitment.…”

“…Some reflect this tendency in studies examining adultchild and teaching-learning relationships. Others explore how political and educational leaders convert what they have learned in one generation into new social forms, cultural constructions, and visions of educational, political, and economic possibility in the next (deMause, 1974;Finkelstein, 1990;Greven, 1977;Vine, 1979).…”

Chapter 6: Education Historians as Mythmakers

“…They appear as protracted grouplearning settings within which teacher culture, youth culture, work culture, and the culture of the book form important new forms of human Finkelstein: Education Historians 285 association, ways of seeing, feeling, believing, and knowing (Aries, 1962;Biklen, 1990;Calhoun, 1973;deMause, 1974;Finkelstein, 1986Finkelstein, , 1990Hamilton, 1980). Thus, they have found ways to link education history to hitherto unrecognized traditions and concerns.…”

“…With the exception of a few historians of childhood and youth and psychohistory (deMause, 1974;Finkelstein, 1990;Fishman, 1979;Hawes & Hiner, 1985), a handful of biographers, and a few context-sensitive historians such as Daniel Calhoun (1973), Larry Cuban (1984Cuban ( , 1986, and David Hogan (1989), historians of education have not as yet availed themselves of conceptual or technical approaches that will reveal the data from which traditions of learning can emerge. The few who have done so proceed on an assumption that processes of cultural transmission will be incompletely understood and unnecessarily narrowed by a single-minded preoccupation with teaching, and they have called for the systematic study of two of education history's most neglected aspects-learners and learning itself.…”

Building an intentional culture of learning from the perspectives of alternative high school educators

“…Therefore, academic results are often disappointing, especially in the graduation rates for Latino, Native American, and Black students who lag 15 to 20 points behind their White and Asian contemporaries (American Council on (Finkelstein, 1990), evolved into what became known as traditional schooling (Mondale & Patton, 2001). …”