Thanks to Bertis Downs of Athens, Georgia, a public school parent and a director of the Network for Public Education, for sharing this nugget of inspiration about one of the primary founders of public education:
“From Garrison Keillor’s Writer’s Almanac daily email:
http://writersalmanac.publicradio.org/
It’s the birthday of the man who said, “Education is our only political safety. Outside of this ark, all is deluge.” The father of American public education, Horace Mann, was born on this day in Franklin, Massachusetts, in 1796. He grew up without much money or schooling, and what he did learn, he learned on his own at his local library, which had been founded by Benjamin Franklin. He was accepted into Brown University and graduated in three years, valedictorian of his class.
“He was elected to the state legislature in 1827, and 10 years later, when Massachusetts created the first board of education in the country, he was appointed secretary. Up to this point, he hadn’t had any particular interest in education, but when he took the post he dedicated himself to it wholeheartedly. He personally inspected every school in the state, gave numerous lectures, and published annual reports advocating the benefits of a common school education for both the student and the state. He spearheaded the Common School Movement, which ensured all children could receive a basic education funded by taxes.
“He was elected to the United States Congress in 1848 after the death of John Quincy Adams, and in his first speech, he spoke out against slavery. He wrote in a letter later that year: “I think the country is to experience serious times. Interference with slavery will excite civil commotion in the South. But it is best to interfere. Now is the time to see whether the Union is a rope of sand or a band of steel.”
“When he left politics, he moved to Ohio to accept a position as president of Antioch College. “I beseech you to treasure up in your hearts these my parting words,” he told one graduating class: “Be ashamed to die until you have won some victory for humanity.”
Thanks Diane, Bertis, and Garrison for remembering Horace Mann today. Happy Birthday Horace. What a great man. I didn’t know about Garrison Keillor’s writers almanac web page but now I am a subscriber and hopefully can share its contents with my students. Garrison Keillor’s poetry collections are highly recommended by the way.
He must be rolling in his grave.
I think Horace has been fighting mightily to rise from the dead and come take back public education, especially here in his home state of Massachusetts, where the department of Education has had the irony to name in-district charter schools for him:
“Horace Mann charter schools are effectively “in-district” charters whose applications must first be approved by a host school district and, with a few exceptions, the local teachers union. Teachers in Horace Mann charter schools must belong to the local union, but they may be subject to a thin contract that waives most of the provisions not associated with compensation.”
This article, written by James Peyser, former Chairman of the Board of Education, cheerleads the call to raise the cap on numbers of charter schools allowed in the city of Boston. Unsurprisingly, Peyser shouts out to New Orleans for its rousing charter school successes.
For this and other lies, see:
http://educationnext.org/boston-and-the-charter-school-cap/
For more on the author, a true rheeformer, see:
http://educationnext.org/author/jpeyser/
I don’t want Horace Mann to roll in his grave too much. Let him see there are fighters too! Do take a read at Valerie Strauss’s blog article.. about a letter to Arne Duncan regarding Washington State’s refusal to back down in light of the NCLB Waiver…
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer-sheet/wp/2014/05/04/arne-duncan-can-keep-his-cynical-nclb-waiver-washington-school-board-member/
Refreshing to read words and ideas familiar to my soul.
Bet we will not see Horace Mann’s words on a Pearson Close Reading passage.
We must continue to share the past to make sure young people realize that Gates is not the father (yes, stepfather?) of modern education.
It’s all very grassroots, collaborative and transparent, really:
“In mid-February, less than a month before the Texas primaries, an out-of-state nonprofit group with a penchant for spending big to influence elections across the country started pouring money into several races in the Lone Star State.
When the dust settled, Education Reform Now Advocacy, the political arm of a New York City-based pro-charter school outfit, reported dropping roughly $115,000 for mailers promoting candidates in three Texas House races and one running for state board of education, records show.
The individual donors bankrolling the effort? Nameless.”
http://www.houstonchronicle.com/news/houston-texas/houston/article/Nonprofit-groups-using-law-to-anonymously-back-5433896.php?cmpid=twitter-premium&t=e9f4a32cb7
A memorable day indeed.
It began on Wednesday, April 30, 2014. I ordered A CHRONICLE OF ECHOES by Mercedes Schneider. I was told it would easily take more than a week to arrive; in any case, not worry about it for another two weeks.
Early this morning, Sunday, May 4, 2014, I picked up my Sunday newspaper. Lo and behold—there lay A CHRONICLE OF ECHOES! It had been sitting there since sometime late yesterday.
So a double celebration today.
My first thank you. A prescient comment by Horace Mann on the pedagogical thrust of the low-level skills and docility training the self-styled “education reformers” are attempting to impose on the vast majority of students:
“A teacher who is attempting to teach without inspiring the pupil with a desire to learn is hammering on cold iron.”
*For those lost in the closet, er, close reading of CCSS, please refer to Mark Twain: “To a man with a hammer, everything looks like a nail.” With the added proviso that this applies only to wielding the hammer of ‘education reform’ on OTHER PEOPLE’S CHILDREN. For THEIR OWN CHILDREN, an education that John Dewey would envy.*
My second thank you.
I have only read the first few pages of A CHRONICLE OF ECHOES. Dr. Mercedes Schneider is very generous in her praise of the owner of this blog.
I have more than a 98% “satisfactory” [thank you, Bill Gates!] chance of being correct that many viewers of this blog deeply appreciate what deutsch29 has done even in the face of personal difficulties that would have overwhelmed many others. It is an illusion, a pleasant one perhaps, that we feel we know you even if we haven’t met you in person.
But you remind me of a few folks I have known. I have saved the following for an occasion just like this:
“The difficulty is not so great to die for a friend, as to find a friend worth dying for.” [Homer]
Most krazy props to a most KrazyMathLady.
😎
I’m going to order my copy of Schneider’s book today. And, I’m going to e-mail my state board of education to see if they need me to send them a copy.
I agree with your post thanking deutsch29.
A useful account of Horace Mann is at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horace_Mann
Could this be the reason that the national thought leaders in education chose May 4th to kick off their “Retreat, Relax, Reform” meeting at Camp Philos?
My hunch is that old Horace is turning in his grave at the irony of it all.
He may be directing it.
Yes, he would be very comfortable there.
Unfortunately, this is probably quite true. Mann’s prior experience to being appointed as Secretary of the Massachusetts Board of Education was as a lawyer and a state legislator. He then ushered in a sweeping set of reforms.
While most educators appreciate Mann’s contributions in terms of results, his credentials coming into his leadership role are similar in many respect to Mark Waller and I think most educators are critical of non-educators being placed in public school leadership positions (and rightly so).
Those of us who are of a certain age, Diane, feel strongly these words: “Be ashamed to die until you have won some victory for humanity.” Clearly, you do, Diane, as your daily actions so clearly attest. Thank you for that.
We need to deconstruct this man:
Under the auspices of the board, but at his own expense, he went to Europe in 1843 to visit schools, especially in Prussia, and his seventh annual report, published after his return, embodied the results of his tour. Many editions of this report were printed, not only in Massachusetts, but in other states, in some cases by private individuals and in others by legislatures; several editions were issued in England. In 1852, he supported the decision to adopt the Prussian education system in Massachusetts. Shortly after Massachusetts adopted the Prussian system, the Governor of New York set up the same method in twelve different New York schools on a trial basis.
Instilling values such as obedience to authority, promptness in attendance, and organizing the time according to bell ringing helped students prepare for future employment. Mann faced some resistance from parents who did not want to give up the moral education to teachers and bureaucrats. The normal schools trained mostly women, giving them new career opportunities as teachers.[8]
from John Taylor Gatto:
Magic At Work
Magic in one form or another had always appealed to professional school authorities as the means to manage students. Horace Mann, as you know, dedicated his entire Sixth Report to a paean in praise of phrenology, the “science” of reading head bumps, and every major schoolman from Mann to G. Stanley Hall and John Dewey was a serious phrenologist—long after the craze had vanished from upper-class drawing rooms and salons. That should tell you something important about the inner itches of these men, I think. The quest for certainty in a confusing new land without rules was as much the religion of our founding schoolmen as searching one’s family for signs of reprobation had been for Puritans. But modern schoolmen needed a scientific cast over their religiosity, times having changed.
Early educational psychologists scientized the practice of manipulation behind a common expression of modern pedagogy—”motivation.” Book after book advised pedagogues how to “motivate” charges with technical advice based on an underlying premise that young people did not want to learn and had to be tricked into it, a premise which on the face of common experience was absurd. As the significance of Bernays’ arguments penetrated the high command of government and industry, so too did manipulation become sine qua non in classroom teaching, the standard by which teacher quality was measured.
But the methods of Bernays or of educational psychologists like Dewey, Munsterberg, Judd, Hall, Cattell, Terman, Thorndike, Goddard, and Watson which so radically transformed the shape of twentieth-century schooling are about indoctrination strategies—building and using psychological tools to create compliant children. If nature hadn’t cooperated by actually making empty children, then schooling would have to do the job. And yet, for what grand purpose children had to be emptied, not many knew. For those without religious training or ignorant of the evolutionary sciences, it made only the bleakest sort of sense.
Does this sound like what is happening today with the “skills” needed for the 21st Century? It’s all about controlling teachers and students. Mann was a scary dude.
Joseph is correct. It is unwise to pick out a few eloquent quotes without looking at the whole life and ultimate actions of the person. (For example Winston Churchill has said many memorable and important things but the sweep of his life was spent in imperial conquest. The sun never sets on the British Empire. FDR agreed to help him during WWII but warned him that after the war was over, his imperialism, especially regarding Africa would have to end. Unfortunately, FDR died too soon.)
Horace Mann was at the beginning of a downward spiral away from classical education, the kind that Benjamin Franklin would have endorsed, to a factory style of uniformity and bell ringing systems. Mann was part of the group that did not distinguish man from animal as was John Dewey. I don’t know why anyone reveres Dewey at this point when we know so much about him. He studied under G. Stanley Hall who studied in Germany under the philosopher Wilhelm Wundt. Apply the right stimulus to produce the desired result. Training rats is not like training children unless you believe children have no soul. Then it really does make no difference.
Benjamin Franklin was a man of God. Mann, Hall and Dewey were not. When God left the classroom and our republic, all hell broke loose. I know that is a very old-fashioned view and very politically incorrect to say such things on a blog but I’ll go there.
Dawn, you know that Franklin denied that Scripture was divine revelation, don’t you? See his autobiography.
Benjamin Franklin’s Creed
A few weeks before his death at age 84, Benjamin Franklin summarized his religious beliefs, in terms with which I could readily associate myself:
You desire to know something of my religion. It is the first time I have been questioned upon it. But I cannot take your curiosity amiss, and shall endeavor in a few words to gratify it.
Here is my creed.
•I believe in one God, the creator of the universe.
•That he governs by his providence.
•That he ought to be worshipped.
•That the most acceptable service we render to him is doing good to his other children.
•That the soul of man is immortal, and will be treated with justice in another life respecting its conduct in this.
These I take to be the fundamental points in all sound religion, and I regard them as you do in whatever sect I meet with them.
As to Jesus of Nazareth, my opinion of whom you particularly desire,
•I think his system of morals and his religion, as he left them to us, the best the world ever saw or is likely to see; but I apprehend it has received various corrupting changes,
•and I have, with most of the present dissenters in England, some doubts as to his divinity;
•though it is a question I do not dogmatize upon, having never studied it, and think it needless to busy myself with it now, when I expect soon an opportunity of knowing the truth with less trouble.
•I see no harm, however, in its being believed, if that belief has the good consequences, as probably it has, of making his doctrines more respected and more observed;
•especially as I do not perceive that the Supreme takes it amiss, by distinguishing the unbelievers in his government of the world with any peculiar marks of his displeasure.
Benj. Franklin, Letter to Ezra Stiles, 9 March 1790, in John Bigelow, ed., The Works of Benjamin Franklin, at 12:185-86 (New York: Putnam’s, 1904) (paragraphing edited and bullets added for readability).
Your quotes show that Franklin was a Deist, not a Christian. If that’s what you meant by “man of God”, then I agree with you, he was a man of God.
This is what he writes in his autobiography:
“Before I enter upon my public appearance in business, it may be well to let you know the then state of my mind with regard to my principles and morals, that you may see how far those influenced the future events of my life. My parents had early given me religious impressions, and brought me through my childhood piously in the Dissenting way. But I was scarce fifteen when after doubting, by turns, of several points as I found them disputed in the different books I read, I began to doubt of Revelation itself. Some books against Deism fell into my hands; they were said to be the substance of sermons preached at Boyle’s Lectures. It happened that they wrought an effect on me quite contrary to what was intended by them; for the arguments of the Deists, which were quoted to be refuted, appeared to me much stronger than the refutations; in short, I soon became a thorough Deist. My arguments perverted some others, particularly Collins and Ralph; but each of them having afterwards wronged me greatly without the least compunction, and recollecting Keith’s conduct towards me (who was another free-thinker) and my own towards Vernon and Miss Read, which at times gave me great trouble, I began to suspect that this doctrine, tho’ it might be true, was not very useful.”
He “doubts of Revelation itself”.
Franklin believed in one God. My post was about the dissent of education into the morass that we have today starting with people like Horace Mann and including John Dewey who were instrumental in taking God and the concept of humans being created in the image of God with souls and minds which delight in creation and discovery out of the classroom. The Bill Gates approach to education is a particularly anti-human approach. Since he is a eugenicist that only makes sense that he thinks of children as “human capital” to be uniformly replicated and manipulated into a place in the system which is convenient for corporations but does not acknowledge the child’s humanity, creativity or soul.
I’ve been studying Hannah Arendt lately. It seems she stayed in Germany until it became apparent that nothing could be done to fight the Nazis anymore. She went to New York.
Diane Ravitch is our Hannah Arendt. Soon will come the time when Dr. Ravitch should lead her faithful to a free country like Germany (ironically), Finland, Sweden, or Denmark. Soon, they may not allow Americans to leave anymore. Telling people to stay and fight in this kind of system is going to lead to a lot of suffering of good people.
Sent from my iPad
Reblogged this on TN BATs BlOG.
This is great. Thanks Diane!
Diane, I particularly like the last line quote.“Be ashamed to die until you have won some victory for humanity.” You embody that sense of drive and deliver a sense of urgency to each one of us.
I never cease to learn something here.