Mann Centenary

The years 1935-36-37 will be marked in U. S. educational history as a notable centennial season. Celebrated last year was the 30th anniversary of the first U. S. high school, Boston Latin, which was founded in 1635. Celebrated all last summer was the 300th birthday of Harvard, first U. S. college (TIME, Sept. 28). At Antioch College in Yellow Springs, Ohio, last week began the year-long observance of the Centenary of the great U. S. educator, Horace Mann.

To Yellow Springs, to pull the trigger of the opening gun of the Mann Centenary, went Columbia's old Philosopher John Dewey, President Karl Taylor Compton of Massachusetts Institute of Technology, onetime U. S. Commissioner of Education George Frederick Zook, 370 other schoolmen. The Centenary will spread to the U. S. public schools to which Horace Mann contributed more than any other individual and on which his fame securely rests.

The event of July 1, 1837 which the Centenary commemorates was to all appearances an unremarkable one. On that day Horace Mann, a lawyer just past 41 who had done an honest but unexciting turn in Massachusetts politics, resigned the presidency of the Massachusetts Senate to become Secretary of the Common wealth's first Board of Education. That Mann should abandon a profitable law practice for a newly created job paying $1,500 a year surprised his acquaintances. Lanky, jut-jawed Lawyer Mann, however, was known to be a man of individual and tenacious opinions. He believed in phrenology. He despised smoking, drinking, ballet dancing. He was proud of being a self-made man, who had been schooled intermittently in his youth, braiding straw in his father's farmhouse in Franklin, Mass, to earn his books, working his way through Brown University and Litchfield (Conn.) Law School. In 1832, when his wife Charlotte Messer, daughter of Brown's president, had died, Lawyer Mann's hair supposedly turned white in a single night and he became more reclusive and contemplative than ever.

In 1837 Massachusetts' public schools, although almost two centuries old, were sunk in physical and spiritual disrepair. One third of the Commonwealth's children had no educational opportunities whatever. The Secretary of the new Board of Education began his work with little authority, less encouragement. Tirelessly he set about raising money, delivering speeches, holding Town meetings to spread the gospel of universal education. Without fanfare he established a Normal school in Lexington, first in the U. S. He set up and enforced a minimum school year of six months. In the next decade Massachusetts spent more than $2,000,000 on school buildings and equipment, established 50 new public high schools. Gradually Mann's influence spread to other states through his famed annual reports. In 1830 only three states (Massachusetts, Maine, New Hampshire) supported free elementary schools. By 1848 when the Massachusetts Secretary was ready to give up his job to return to politics, the public school movement was awakening over the land and Horace Mann was a national figure.

Horace Mann immediately succeeded to John Quincy Adams' seat in Congress as an anti-Slavery Whig. In 1850 he wrecked what might have been a promising political career by breaking with Daniel Webster after that statesman's "Seventh of March Speech," advocating a compromise on the extension of slavery to the Northern territories. In 1852 Mann was defeated as the Free-Soil candidate for governor of Massachusetts. Same year he returned to education by accepting the presidency of New Antioch College.

At Antioch, Mann and his second wife, Mary Tyler Peabody, whose sister was the wife of Nathaniel Hawthorne, bought a farm on the muddy Little Miami River, courageously started out anew. Mann accepted women as students, engaged several "lady professors." But the next six years were mainly a long, heartbreaking struggle to keep the college alive. Mann's salary, reduced from $3,000 to $2,000, then to $1,500, was never paid in full. In 1859 the college was sold for debt and reorganized by the trustees. Few months later he died.

Dedicated last week at Antioch was a statue of Horace Mann, contributed by alumnus Hugh Taylor Birch, made from the same casting as the one by Sculptor Emma Stebbins set up in 1865 in front of Boston State House. On the highest knoll of Mann's farm, now college property, the statue shows him standing erect, draped in a shawl which he wore in his farmhouse on wintry days, looking across Glen Helen forest to Antioch College.

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