Part Eight of The Enlightenment of the American Mind

Part Eight

Immigrants fill out our country

During the 1820’s, northern European nations loosened their emigration policies as their populations surged. The railroad and shipping industries seized the opportunity and promoted emigration to America.

Our foreign consulates multiplied and often acted as land agents and labor recruiters, which helped spur the growth of our fledgling Industrial Revolution. Government and industry leaders learned to cooperate.

Beginning in 1845, the Potato Famine in Ireland created a massive exodus from the Emerald Isle. Over a million Irish emigrated to America that year alone. Over the next eighty years, millions more resettled here, typically in ethnic communities oriented around the Catholic Church.

In the late 1840’s and early 1850’s, German immigration increased dramatically and eventually outnumbered the Irish. Many arrived for economic opportunities. Others fled government oppression, land reforms, food shortages, and revolutions. Germantowns developed across our nation. German Jews also arrived, beginning in the 1820’s.

Among the German immigrants were the “Forty-Eighters,” the failed socialist revolutionaries of 1848. Many had been imprisoned in their homeland for their subversive activities and views. In America, their numbers were small, estimated between four and ten thousand, but they were zealous and pursued their progressive agenda in their adopted land.

Most Forty-Eighters believed in a strong central government because of its ability to enact their progressive reforms and implement socialism successfully. Many later joined Lincoln’s Union Army. A few became Generals, including Carl Schurz who had an illustrious career in America as a newspaperman, Civil War General, U.S. Senator, and Secretary of the Interior. Schurz was a friend of the prominent socialist and publisher, Horace Greeley, and helped found the short-lived Liberal Republican Party with Greeley and Whitelaw Reid.

Progressive historians portray the Forty-Eighters as selfless abolitionists, who joined the army to eradicate slavery, but that was a minor concern and not their priority.

Besides the influx of Irish and Germans, Britain, France, and Scandinavia sent large numbers of immigrants to America before the Civil War. America hosted a wide diversity of cultures, but diversity was not a predominant feature within most communities.

A change in immigration patterns

After our Civil War, the Germans continued to dominate the immigration lists, followed by the British and Irish. Scandinavians, Chinese, and Japanese also arrived in large numbers. But the demographics began to change as new technology enabled the railroad and shipping industries to lower their rates and expand their operations into less affluent countries.

At the time, American industrialists promoted massive immigration to keep wages artificially low. They needed workers not independent thinkers like the old days. During the 1880’s, over 300,000 immigrants arrived from Italy alone.

From 1880 to World War I, the new trend perpetuated. By 1910, nearly seventy percent of immigrants arrived from Southern and Eastern Europe, led by the Italians. Others included Hungarians, Polish, Slovaks, and Greeks. The remaining thirty percent was dominated by the Germans. Canadians, Latin Americans, and Russian Jews fleeing the pogroms also resettled here in significant numbers.

Like those before them, most immigrants either established or joined existing ethnic communities in cities across the land. The influx of new immigrants didn’t change the concept of an American community, but some elitists were concerned with the changing quality.

In 1896, Francis A. Walker, the President of M.I.T., described the change in the June edition of the Atlantic Monthly, “Fifty, even thirty years ago, there was a rightful presumption regarding the average immigrant that he was among the most enterprising, thrifty, alert, adventurous, and courageous of the community from which he came. It required no small energy, prudence, forethought, and pains to conduct the inquiries relating to his migration, to accumulate the necessary means, and to find his way across the Atlantic.

“Today the presumption is completely reversed. So thoroughly has the continent of Europe been crossed by railways, so effectively has the business of emigration there been exploited, so much have the rates of railroad fares and ocean passage been reduced, that it is now among the least thrifty and prosperous members of any European community that the emigration agent finds his best recruiting-ground.”

Walker wanted to restrict immigration, because his political class was losing power to the expanding voting blocks of new immigrants, who out-bred the elites and began to outnumber the natives in certain strongholds. These immigrants weren’t assimilating into the American culture like their predecessors. Many didn’t read English and couldn’t be coerced by the American media to vote properly.

At the turn of the 20th Century, Anglo-Saxons remained the dominant residing ethnic group and represented about a third of our population, but the German population – estimated around eighteen million – was the second largest and continued to dominate our immigration lists up until WWI.

This development would have alarmed some of our founders, including Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson. They felt the German culture was incompatible with that of a free republic.

In 1751, Benjamin Franklin wrote in Observations on the Increase of Mankind, “why should the Palatine Boors be suffered to swarm into our Settlements and, by herding together, establish their Language and Manners, to the Exclusion of ours? Why should Pennsylvania, founded by the English, become a Colony of Aliens who will shortly be so numerous as to Germanize us instead of our Anglifying them?”

Franklin excised this statement from subsequent editions, but progressive scholars use it to illustrate the racist views of our founders. In light of the many failures of multiculturalism, Franklin’s concerns were justified and went unheeded until we declared war against Germany during World War I.

More revolutions in thought

In 1841, the University of Berlin graduate student, Karl Marx, completed his doctoral thesis, The Differences of the Democritean and Epicurean Philosophy of Nature. He knew it was too controversial for his Berlin professors and submitted it instead to the University of Jena, which granted him a PhD. His biographer Francis Wheen described his thesis as “a daring and original piece of work in which Marx set out to show that theology must yield to the superior wisdom of philosophy.”

Four years later, Marx penned his famous precept in Theses on Feuerbach, which he left unpublished. He wrote, “Philosophers have only interpreted the world, the point is to change it.”

In 1848, Marx and fellow University of Berlin graduate, Friedrich Engels, co-published the Communist Manifesto, which provided the intellectual argument that justified revolutions worldwide and revealed a blueprint for action. This monumental work had a minimal effect during the revolutionary year of 1848.

Marx and Engels understood the necessity to educate the masses. The last of their ten planks called for “free education for all children in government schools,” which was vital to indoctrinate the rising generation in socialism. They hoped their Manifesto would hasten its rise.

For a number of years, their manifesto remained a “literary curiosity,” as the co-authors lamented in their preface to the 1882 Russian edition. By that time, it had been published throughout the world and was internationally acclaimed.

On October 25, 1851 the New-York Tribune introduced “articles from some foreign contributors that are specially worthy of attention.” The New-York Tribune was America’s leading Whig daily, established in 1841 by Horace Greeley to promote his favorite causes – including socialism – and his political favorites.

One of the new contributors was the German philosopher Karl Marx – then unknown, who was described by the editor – either Charles Anderson Dana or Greeley – as “one of the clearest and most vigorous writers that country has produced.” His first article was Revolution and Counter-Revolution, which introduced Marx’s world-view to the American audience.

This began a decade-long effort which helped finance Marx’s meager existence in his Soho garret in London. He produced hundreds of articles sometimes in collaboration with Engels and sometimes published anonymously. These articles subtly influenced their readers and provided much of the material for Marx’ monumental three-volume Das Kapital.

It’s rarely reported that both Horace Greeley and Charles Dana were huge admirers of Karl Marx and ardent socialists. It’s also inaccurate to characterize the New-York Tribune strictly as a Whig daily, as it was also a mouthpiece for socialism.

Today, progressive scholars consider Karl Marx as one of the most influential thinkers in history and claim his Manifesto is the most important political document of all time.

***

In 1859, Charles Darwin published his monumental work On the Origin of Species and established the theory of evolution based on natural selection. Although, in his first edition, Darwin never used the term “evolution.”

Two years later, Karl Marx wrote to his fellow University of Berlin graduate, Ferdinand Lassalle, that Origin of Species “provides a basis in natural science for the historical class struggle.” Darwin’s theory legitimized the socialist world-view.

His book renewed the battle between Christianity and science. Progressives applauded his work, while the conservative theologians were outraged. Books and articles were hurled back and forth. Eventually, many liberal theologians surrendered – perhaps because of all the prior defeats at the hands of science – without realizing the significance.

In this work, Darwin did not claim the highest form of life on earth had evolved from animals, but he implied it and suggested the transmutation from apes, which contradicted the Bible’s underlying premise that humanity was created in the image of God with a higher destiny than the other animals. If Darwin’s creation story was true, then the Bible was false.

Liberal theologians tried to reconcile the situation and claimed the two creation stories in the Bible – which seemed to contradict each other – were allegories. This confused their congregations. They weren’t sure what was allegory and what was truth, and their confused leaders couldn’t enlighten them.

In 1896, Andrew Dickson White published a scathing attack on Christianity, A History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom. He announced, “The theory of an evolution process in the formation of the universe and of animated nature is established, and the old theory of direct creation is gone forever.”

Publicly, White did not consider his book an attack on Christianity. Throughout his book, he claimed his scholarship ennobled our sacred faith – somehow – which was progressive nonsense.

White was one of the most esteemed intellectuals of his day, a scholar, educator, and diplomat.

***

In 1845, adventurer Austen Henry Layard pioneered British archeology in Iraq as he excavated an ancient palace at Nimrud, the home of the brutal Assyrian King, Ashurnasirpal, who ruled Assyria from 883 BC to 859 BC and terrorized the world.

In 1849, Layard began work on ancient Nineveh and unearthed King Sennacherib’s palace. When he discovered a library with thousands of written records in the form of broken clay tablets, Assyriology was enriched as a new field of study.

In 1852, on the same mound, his assistant, Hormuz Rassam, discovered a greater library in the palace of King Sennacherib’s grandson, King Ashurbanipal. Rassam shipped a larger collection of clay fragments, bas-reliefs, and sculptures to the British Museum in London.

Unfortunately, the early work was sloppy, and the two libraries were co-mingled.

British archaeologist, George Smith, continued the work, first at the British Museum where he taught himself to translate the Assyrian cuneiform writings, and later in the ruins of ancient Nineveh.

In 1872, while sifting through the museum’s vast collection, Smith discovered a fragment of an ancient myth that was later called the Epic of Gilgamesh.

As he translated the fragment, he could not contain his excitement. It spoke of a universal flood that destroyed all the earth’s inhabitants except a few who were forewarned and commanded to build an ark. When he finished his translation, he knew he had made a major discovery.

When he published his findings, he created an international sensation and became famous overnight. The myth eerily resembled the Biblical account of Noah’s ark.

The myth had been written on clay and then baked sometime during Ashurbanipal’s reign in the 7th Century BC. After further study, it was concluded to be of Babylonian origin and was likely composed at least a thousand years earlier. It could have been originally composed as far back as the Tower of Babel.

As newspapers across the world published the discovery, there were two theories. Gilgamesh could either bolster the Bible, or discredit it, but there wasn’t enough evidence to prove either side.

On December 22, 1872, the New York Times reprinted an article from London that explained, “This discovery is evidently destined to excite a lively controversy. For the present the orthodox people are in great delight, and are very much prepossessed by the corroboration which it affords to Biblical history. It is possible … that the Chaldean inscription, if genuine, may be regarded as a confirmation of the statement that there are various traditions of the deluge apart from the Biblical one, which is perhaps legendary like the rest.”

In 1876, Smith published his translation of another ancient Babylonian myth called Enuma Elish that resembled the Bible’s creation story. Tragically, Smith died of dysentery later that summer while in the Ottoman city of Aleppo.

Eventually, the consensus shifted and the Biblical accounts became “legendary like the rest.” In his book of 1896, Andrew D. White declared, “In the ancient religions of Chaldea and Babylonia there was elaborated a narrative of creation which, in its most important features, must have been the source of that in our own sacred books.” In a note, he added, “For an exact statement of the resemblances which have settled the question among the most eminent scholars in favor of the derivation of the Hebrew cosmogony from that of Assyria, see Jensen …” (Italics added.)

***

For centuries, geologists had questioned the theological conception of the age of the earth. Dinosaur bones provided evidence of an ancient world much older than commonly thought. Other fossils were found in strata quite different from its original form, and some mountains were once under water. Scientists theorized that this required hundreds of thousands of years to develop.

During the 19th Century, geologists teamed with paleontologists, anthropologists, archeologists, and other historians of antiquity and expanded earth’s history backwards. Between 1820 and 1850, after extensive analysis of all the scientific data, the geological periods commonly used today were developed. Much later, the earth was said to be over four billion years old.

This age can’t be scientifically proven, but the earth is obviously much older than the theological construct. Theologians had again erred in their interpretive “revelations.” The Bible never claimed the Earth was created “ex nihilo,” or out of nothing. This concept was introduced into the Eastern churches in the 2nd Century AD and later established in the Latin world by Augustine two centuries later.

The Bible used the term “barau” for “create” which should be rendered as “organized,” which implies pre-existent material.

This new geology bolstered Darwin’s theory of evolution, which required billions of years of development. Modern anthropologists then constructed an inspiring superstructure that showed the slow development of humanity from apes, through epochs of evolution. Ages of cave-dwellers and nomadic hunter-gatherers eventually led to settled communities based on agriculture.

Their theoretical constructions and hypothetical wishes were reinforced by elaborate museum exhibitions presented as science, but there was nothing scientific about it.

***

Archeologists continued the attack on the Bible when they used a variety of pseudo-scientific dating methods and determined that cities like Jericho thrived long before the Biblical account. They claimed that a number of civilized communities existed long before the Biblical beginning of 4000 BC. And they developed time-lines that became established “facts.”

By the late 19th Century, many progressives had become “eminent scholars.” As they rose in power and prestige, they spawned thousands of disciples. Together they established new fields of inquiry and “settled” many questions with answers that reinforced their progressive world-view.

A Revolution in America’s Traditional Education

Part 7 of “The Enlightenment of the American Mind”
(Author’s note: I copied and pasted this from another source. None of the italics transferred. All titles of books, articles, journals, etc will be in caps, but looks awkward.)

Part Seven

A revolution in America’s traditional education

In 1835, after Everett served ten years as a US Congressman, he was elected the governor of Massachusetts. Two years later, the state legislature created the Massachusetts Board of Education. Everett appointed his fellow Unitarian, Horace Mann, as the first Secretary of the Board. Mann remained Secretary from 1837 to 1848 and laid the groundwork that eventually overhauled the entire system in Massachusetts.

Some were surprised by the nomination of Mann because of his lack of experience on educational matters. Mann was a trained lawyer and politician. Like Everett, he was a Whig who supported Henry Clay’s American System and served the interests of the wealthy upper class in Massachusetts, who were not only politically active, but also the most affected by taxes and the laws of the land.

It didn’t take long before the doubters realized Everett made the right choice. Our progressive reformers didn’t need an educator at the time. They needed an articulate orator to change public opinion. Mann was an extraordinary speaker gifted with eloquence. He made an excellent frontman devoted to the great cause.

At the time, the people of the state of Massachusetts were arguably the most educated in the world and provided a variety of educational opportunities and some of the best.

Prior to the state infringement, the local school district had complete autonomy. The responsibility resided in the local communities and their families. Mann and his colleagues wanted a centralized administration like the Prussians. They wanted to emulate their methods and achieve their efficiency. They knew their success was predicated on extensive training for teachers and then hiring the best. In Prussia, teaching was a noble profession. Teachers were highly respected, which helped create order in the classroom.

America’s reformers also admired the foundational principles of Prussia’s largest school system – the volkschulen or people’s school – which served the peasant working class, which comprised over ninety percent of their population. Attendance was mandatory with two exceptions – sickness or death. If any child became truant, parents received a notice. If the child remained absent, another notice would warn of the final solution – imprisonment.

These Common Schools were founded on the principles of Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi. By 1825, every Common School in Prussia used his methods.

Illuminatus Pestalozzi relied on Rousseau’s theories, but he was also an innovator who continually modified his methods. He believed education should be child-centered not teacher-directed, which meant the children determined their own course of learning as they gravitated to their own interests. He believed education should be object-based – centered on the senses – not lectures demanding memorization and recitals. He didn’t need textbooks, as he used “teacher’s aids,” real objects for study. When unavailable, he used pictures of objects or other representations.

The heart of Pestalozzi’s approach was based on his belief that teachers should befriend their pupils and love them like the fathers they replaced. As teachers gained the trust of their students, they reduced disciplinary problems and the need for corporal punishment.

His students became experts in identifying objects of the natural world, but they were not drilled in memory and logic. They neglected world history and the great books of the past. Without any connection to the past, they were unmoored from all the links that bound them to the present reality, and their minds remained unorganized. Independent thought rarely developed as they followed the group and its benevolent leaders. These peasant children were trained in the duties of the lower class and learned to be content with their lowly position in the world order.

Although few Americans took notice at the time, Pestalozzi was introduced to America in 1808 when Joseph Neef published his pedagogic system originally titled Sketch of a Plan and Method of Education, Founded on an Analysis of the Human Faculties, and Natural Reason, Suitable to the Offspring of a Free People, and for all Rational Beings. Neef listed his qualifications as a former “Coadjutor of Pestalozzi, at his school near Berne, Switzerland.” He thought it prudent to publicize his methods because they were radically different from all his predecessors in America.

In his first chapter, he differentiated four sources of knowledge. He claimed the most reliable truths were obtained through the senses. The second best source was tapped through our mental powers, but he cautioned that our memories are often false. The third best source for truth was obtained through analogy. The fourth and most unreliable source “is that which we acquire through the testimony and evidence of our fellow men.”

Revelation was unacknowledged as a source for truth, but Neef elaborated on the most unreliable source. Men are often deceitful for a variety of reasons and sometimes deluded – as witnesses to an event often disagree. Neef boldly declared “Books, therefore, shall be the last fountain from which we shall endeavor to draw our knowledge.”

He knew this statement would draw outrage, but he was defiant. “Many enlightened pedagogues will not hesitate to proclaim me a barbarian … it would be idle to combat their inveterate prejudices … I do not care for them … my pupils shall pry into no book, turn over no book, read no book, till they are able not only to comprehend what they are to read, but also to distinguish perfectly well, good from bad; truth from falsehood; reality from chimera; and probabilities from absurdities. God’s beauteous and prolific creation, all nature shall be their book, and facts their instructors.”

Neef’s Sketch replaced every traditional approach in teaching with an innovation. The next year, he opened a country school in Falls of Schuylkill just outside Philadelphia.

Neef had been recruited by one of America’s earliest philanthropists, William Maclure, who – according to his own account – discovered Pestalozzi’s school in Yverdun by chance in the summer of 1805 while traveling through Switzerland. He became an instant admirer and tried to recruit Pestalozzi, but the old educator refused. Pestalozzi recommended one of his most promising disciples, who had opened a school in Paris. At the time, Neef was frustrated and eager to move on.

Neef’s school prospered the first three years, but when he moved it to Village Green in Chester County, and later to Louisville, the school ultimately failed. Neef then turned to farming to earn his bread. He explained in his Sketch that “The education of children and rearing of vegetables, are the only occupations for which I feel any aptitude.”

In 1814, an article in the second volume of the American Medical and Philosophical Register applauded Neef’s Sketch and his benefactor Maclure for their work.

Maclure eventually returned to Paris in 1819 and hired another Pestalozzian, Marie Duclos Fretageot. With Maclure’s financing, she reopened her school in Philadelphia.

Very little is known about Maclure’s early years when he built his fortune. He was born in Scotland and made his first trip to America at age fifteen on behalf of his father’s merchant business. Four years later in 1782, he returned to New York City to establish further business connections. Later that year, he joined the obscure London trading house of Miller, Hart, and Company, and began to amass a fortune. In 1796, he became an American citizen and established Maclure and Company in Philadelphia, which was later renamed Maclure and Robinson. Within a few years, he retired from business and remained quiet about his fortune building days.

Maclure then traveled around the world and pursued social reform, geology, and other “useful arts.” Because of his contributions to geology – financially and scientifically – he is known today as the father of American geology.

Maclure despised other branches of knowledge like theology and history as a waste of time. Antiquities and antiquarians, he claimed, were useless and the latter were despots. He rejected Christianity and believed in an early form of evolution as expressed by the French naturalist, Jean Baptiste Lamarck. Later in 1825, he helped finance Robert Owen’s New Harmony experiment in socialism.

In 1826, Maclure convinced Neef and Fretageot to join him and Robert Owen and create an enlightened educational system at the experimental utopian commune in New Harmony, Indiana.

Owen was a progressive reformer from Wales who financed several utopian projects before he arrived in America. In 1827, in an article in Cooperative Magazine, he was the first to use the term “socialist” in print in its modern sense. When his communal experiment in America failed after two years, Owen blamed the educational practices. Most participants blamed Owen.

Owen established work for his members as a mandatory necessity of life, but he desired complete liberty in his leisure. Some of the married ladies objected to his liberties. In a letter, Maclure explained that many wives left and “declared to their husbands that it was in consequence of the freedom that Mr. Owen took with them that they could not think of remaining under such dreadful risk of their virtue.”

In another letter, Maclure declared “that he is certainly mad.”

Lydia Eveleth wrote a letter to Mrs. Pears in March 1827 and explained that New Harmony’s “once celebrated founder … has now become the abhorrence of this people … indeed, so much is he out of favor here that I do not believe there is one who would even listen patiently to anything he may have to say on his much beloved System and Community.”

In his autobiography Threading My Way, Owen’s son, Robert Dale Owen, expressed the reality. “I do not believe that any industrial experiment can succeed which proposes equal remuneration to all men, the diligent and the dilatory, the skilled artisan and the common laborer, the genius and the drudge … a plan which remunerates all alike will, in the present condition of society, ultimately eliminate from a cooperative association the skilled, efficient, and industrious members, leaving an ineffective and sluggish residue, in whose hands the experiment will fail, both socially and pecuniarily.”

Owen believed such an experiment could succeed in the future once humanity was reformed.

Neef left New Harmony in 1828, but the town was not abandoned, and he returned in 1834.

Maclure and Neef planted seeds of the new educational system in America. Others nurtured it through oratory and the press.

William Russell published the American Journal of Education from 1826 to 1830. In the December issue of 1828, he contributed a short biography on Pestalozzi that praised his saintly ideals. In the September issue of 1829, he published some letters of Pestalozzi on the early education of children.

The French scholar, Victor Cousin, created an international sensation in 1833, when he published his Report on the State of Public Instruction in Prussia. Two years later, it was translated into English and published in New York.

Everett applauded the work of his old friend. He met Cousin years earlier when he studied at Gottingen, and they became traveling companions.

Charles Brooks also applauded Cousin’s work. Brooks was a Unitarian minister in Hingham and met Cousin during a trip to Europe in 1834. While in London, Brooks became a zealot for the Prussian system after he met Dr. Julius from Hamburg at a literary gathering that August.

Dr. Julius was an avid enthusiast of the Prussian system and accompanied Brooks on his return voyage to America. Julius spent forty-one days at sea discussing all the elements and its two pillars – a board of education to centralize administration and Normal Schools to train teachers.

In 1835, Brooks delivered a Thanksgiving sermon that became famous, as it promoted a new kind of school to train teachers. He said, “The whole Prussian system is built on these eight words, as is the teacher, so is the school, and therefore we must have seminaries for the preparation of teachers.”

The next year, he offered to lecture on this topic to any audience without compensation. As invitations flooded in, Brooks spent the next two years giving speeches throughout Massachusetts. He was also invited to address the various state legislatures in the New England states.

On January 18, 1837, Brooks discussed the Prussian system before a full house of the Massachusetts state legislature. In April, the Governor signed the legislation that established the Board of Education.

In 1836, Calvin Stowe – Harriett Beecher Stowe’s husband – published The Prussian System of Public Instruction and its Applicability to the United States, after he traveled throughout Europe for six months to study their educational systems. In December 1837, he followed up with a report to the General Assembly of Ohio titled Elementary Instruction in Europe.

In the January 1837 issue of the American Annals of Education, William C. Woodbridge contributed an article explaining Pestalozzi’s principles. The Annals was the successor to Russell’s Journal of Education.

The American Institute of Instruction was also influential. Mann later described their contributions in his Tenth Annual Report, “The Institute may justly be considered the source of all the improvements in education which have since been made in New England and the other Northern states; and its influence is slowly diffusing itself through the uncongenial regions in the South.”

Horace Mann and his colleagues knew they would have to radically change public opinion, but the groundwork had been paved.

They were also fortunate the religious climate had changed, and Puritan living was no longer dominant. Unitarianism led to more innovations in religious thought and progressive living. Mann recruited the support of these liberal ministers and the progressives of the propertied class.

Mann had studied the law. He was trained in logic and rhetoric, and began as a lawyer. He understood institutions and their evolution. He knew the basis of education – like the rest of our noble institutions – must be founded on a philosophical or theological premise. The purpose of education must be established before the fundamentals are formulated. Mann went further and asked, “How can we conduct education without having conceived a theory of the mind?”

He studied all the available literature to better formulate his ideas and fabricate his rhetoric.

As an enlightened progressive, he rejected theology and became an ardent disciple of the philosophy of Scottish phrenologist George Combe. Combe published The Constitution of Man in June 1828, which was widely acclaimed by progressives and denounced by conservatives for its apparent atheism.

In his preface, Combe admitted, “The great object of the following treatise is to exhibit the constitution of Man, and its relations to several of the most important natural laws, with a view to the improvement of education, and the regulation of individual and national conduct.” (Italics added.)

Combe followed up with Moral Philosophy in 1840. He claimed natural religion was divine, sublime, and supreme. He challenged its adherents to assist humanity in its onward march to perfection, to continually discover and advance truth alongside the discoveries in natural science.

Combe was warmly welcomed by Mann during a trip to America in the fall of 1838. He later accompanied Governor Everett and Secretary Mann to a school convention in Taunton on October 9. Combe enjoyed the company of many of Boston’s enlightened intellectuals, including George Bancroft, George Ticknor, William E. Channing, statesman Daniel Webster, and historian William H. Prescott.

Mann agreed that the Enlightenment’s natural religion was superior to revealed religion. His religion was reason not old-fashioned dogmas and impenetrable mysteries. He believed in the immortality of the soul and the perfectibility of humanity on Earth.

As he continued his education and developed his world-view, he never veered from natural religion. When he sent his sister a copy of Combe’s first book, he wrote, “It’s philosophy is the only practical basis for education.”

Mann concurred with Combe that natural religion must evolve with the natural sciences. Education and pedagogy would of necessity always evolve and change in the wake of these developments.

Mann was a subtle propagandist and tireless in his efforts. He produced an Annual Report as Secretary of the Board and published a bi-monthly journal called Massachusetts Common Schools. He traveled across the state, met with district leaders, and gave speeches in the towns he visited.

In his writings and speeches, he insisted that the inherent inequality between rich and poor was due to the inequalities in education. His Common Schools would bridge the gap and allow everyone the potential to achieve the highest paying positions in society.

He proclaimed his schools as a necessity not an extravagant wish, as a republic needed an intelligent people to govern itself. These schools, he said, would also allow America to prosper far greater than the taxes paid, as prosperity became the new gospel.

He also dramatized the terrible conditions and dismal failures he’d seen across the state, including rundown unhealthy schoolhouses with tyrants for teachers who used dubious methods for discipline and were vicious, unsympathetic, and unlearned. He implied this was the norm.

Mann has been called a champion of social harmony, political stability, and the common man. His vision was comprehensive: modernized Common Schools devoid of sectarian religious training, financed by local taxes, and open for every child. The Bible was allowed and encouraged to be read, but sectarian teachings were outlawed. Mann was a realist who understood the religious climate. He was content to let future generations dispense of the Bible.

He also promoted Normal Schools – academies to train teachers – supported by the state and the town in which it was located.

In 1838, the Massachusetts legislature passed a resolution that established its first three Normal Schools. The next year Normal Schools opened in Lexington and Barre. In 1840, Bridgewater opened the third Normal School in Massachusetts.

The term “Normal School” was popularized by the Prussians but originated in France. These academies were more than training centers. They indoctrinated their teachers into the progressive world-view and introduced them to the principles of Pestalozzi’s system.

The introduction of Pestalozzi in the early Normal Schools was later confirmed by statesman George S. Boutwell. He objected to an article published in the May 1893 issue of Popular Science Monthly. The author claimed the Oswego State Normal School was the first to introduce the Pestalozzian system of teaching. The Oswego School was founded in 1853. In 1859, their educators began to experiment with the ideas of Pestalozzi and appealed to European experts for advice.

Boutwell wrote an article published the following November. He claimed the Massachusetts Normal Schools were training teachers how to use Pestalozzi’s methods beginning in 1839. He thought Oswego’s leaders should have asked the New England states for assistance.

Normal Schools eventually cropped up across our nation until the latter end of the 19th Center, when psychology became popular, took control of pedagogy, and centralized its administration in our expanding universities.

Mann approved of a simpler method of teaching literacy using whole words – the so-called “look-say” method. He said it was more efficient than first teaching the alphabet, then phonetics, and then words. In his Second Annual Report, he wrote, “It has now been practiced for some time in the primary schools of the city of Boston – in which there are four or five thousand children – and it is found to succeed better than the old mode.” Success has always been a relative term.

Mann justified this expediency based on his survey that found “that more than eleven twelfths of all the children in the reading classes, in our schools, do not understand the meaning of the words they read.” Mann claimed they had mastered the mechanical art of reading the words but had not developed intellectual reading which enabled “the comprehension of the author’s ideas.” He implied that his new system would simply reading and rectify the problems of comprehension.

Previously in 1810, the whole word or look-say method of reading was proven a success by its developer, Thomas H. Gallaudet, but his targeted audience were deaf-mutes who had no conception of a spoken language.

In 1835, Mother’s Primer was published in Hartford, Connecticut and popularized the new method for every audience. Massachusetts adopted the new method on an experimental basis.

Mann’s so-called survey was an effective tool to support his rhetoric. When the ends justified the means, accuracy does not matter. An article in the American Journal of Education in 1828 discussed children’s literature and claimed children nowadays “are taught the meaning of words more accurately.”

Surveys with fabricated data have become a feature of modernity.

Our reformers also understood the influence of books. Mann complained that there were few books written for children and not enough libraries.

On April 19, 1838, the Board of Education authorized Mann to publish two sets of books, fifty volumes each, one for children and one for maturer audiences. These two libraries – the Massachusetts Primary School Library and the Massachusetts Common School Library – were required by law to be free of sectarian teachings. To ensure impartiality, every member on the Board had to approve the appropriate books by unanimous consent.

The approved writers included eminent progressives like Jared Sparks, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Washington Irving, Benjamin Silliman, Elizabeth Peabody, Catharine Sedgwick, Robert Rantoul, and Alonzo Potter.

Whether deliberate or unintentional, Mann and his colleagues imitated Adam Weishaupt, who understood that books had to be carefully selected to produce the proper opinions. Mann promoted books that taught “the useful arts” like domestic duties, agriculture, scientific laws, and trading. He denounced fiction as a frivolous waste of time and morally harmful.

He also criticized history books. In his Third Annual Report, he condemned history books that record “the destruction of human life, and the activity of those misguided energies of men which have hitherto almost baffled the beneficent intentions of Nature for human happiness! Descriptions of battles, sackings of cities, and the captivity of nations, follow each other with the quickest movement, and in an endless succession … the reader sees inventive genius, not employed in perfecting the useful arts, but exhausting itself in the manufacture of implements of war; he sees rulers and legislators, not engaged in devising comprehensive plans for universal welfare, but in levying and equipping armies and navies, and extorting taxes to maintain them … the highest honors are conferred upon men in whose rolls of slaughter the most thousands of victims are numbered … the inference which children would legitimately draw from reading like this would be, that the tribes and nations of men had been created only for mutual slaughter.”

These comments are surprising for their audacity. Mann had studied history. He knew it was vital to develop understanding.

Mann helped create a new market – secular books for children – and soon, many were engaged on behalf of “educational and useful” books for children, driven by our publishers and our progressive writers. When Mann claimed there weren’t enough books for children, he meant secular books. The American Journal of Education began reviewing children’s books in the late 1820’s, and there were plenty.

American Romantic Nathaniel Hawthorne began writing children’s stories in 1840 and became a prolific contributor to the cause.

In 1843, Mann married Mary Peabody in her sister’s bookstore, which was a gathering spot for progressive intellectuals, including William Ellery Channing, Margaret Fuller, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Henry David Thoreau.

Mary’s sister, Elizabeth Palmer Peabody, opened her West Street Bookstore in her Boston home in 1840 and cultivated a free-thinking salon frequented by Transcendentalists and other Romantics until it ended in 1852. Margaret Fuller, America’s pioneering feminist, engaged her famous “Conversations” which became popular for its lively discussions, her dazzling expositions, and her advocacy for women’s emancipation. Much of the plans for George Ripley’s utopian Brook Farm were developed within the salon. In 1842, the youngest Peabody sister, Sophia, married Nathaniel Hawthorne in her sister’s salon.

Elizabeth was a Transcendentalist, a prolific writer, a lifelong teacher, and a radical reformer. In 1830, she published anonymously her First Lessons in Grammar on the Plan of Pestalozzi. She also became America’s first female publisher and published Hawthorne’s first book for children Grandfather’s Chair: A History for Youth and Thoreau’s Essay on Civil Disobedience.

In 1859, she discovered Margarethe Schurz at the Boston home of some mutual friends. Margarethe was the wife of German socialist and Forty-Eighter, Carl Schurz, who had emigrated to the United States and become politically active. Elizabeth was enchanted with their young daughter Agathe.

Margarethe explained that her development was helped along by her kindergarten training, a new kind of school for young children developed in Germany by Friedrich Froebel in 1837. Froebel was largely influenced by Pestalozzi. Froebel’s innovation allowed German leaders to rescue the state’s property – their nation’s children – at an early age from the perceived harm of their parents.

Margarethe’s sister had opened the first kindergarten in London in Tavistock Place. When she went to London to assist her sister who was ill at the time, she met her future husband Carl. Schurz was in London in exile after the failed revolutions of 1848.

In 1856, Margarethe subsequently opened America’s first kindergarten in Watertown, Wisconsin, and Agathe was one of her first pupils.

Ellzabeth then studied Froebel’s works including an article in the American Journal of Education in 1856 called “Froebel’s System of Infant Gardens.” In 1860, Elizabeth founded America’s first English-language kindergarten. By 1880, there were over four hundred kindergartens in America.

In 2005, the Peabody sisters were honored for their contributions to American-style Romanticism when award-winning author Megan Marshall published The Peabody Sisters: Three Women who Ignited American Romanticism.

Marshall also wrote Margaret Fuller: A New American Life. Margaret Fuller perhaps exceeded the three sisters and was more influential. Her close friends included American intellectuals Emerson, Thoreau, and Horace Greeley, but also international luminaries like Thomas Carlyle and Giuseppe Mazzini.

In 1840, Fuller and Emerson co-founded the Transcendentalist mouthpiece The Dial, and she became its first editor. She later relocated to New York City after Greeley recruited her for his newspaper The New-York Tribune. In 1846, she traveled to Europe as Greeley’s foreign correspondent and eventually settled in Rome where she met and befriended the radicalized Mazzini. In 1850, her life was tragically cut short during a ship-wreck.

Margaret’s father, Thomas Fuller, coincidentally attacked Henry Clay for spending “his nights at the gaming table, or in the revels of a brothel.” While at Harvard, Thomas became enamored with the Enlightenment thinkers, Joseph Priestly, Claude-Adrien Helvitius, and William Godwin, who were popular at the time.

After the Manns married in 1843, they traveled to Europe for their honeymoon. For Horace it was a working honeymoon and an extended leave of absence. He studied firsthand the various educational systems and met all the contemporary enlighteners of humanity. When he returned, he had direct knowledge and even more enthusiasm for Prussia’s system. He then produced his lengthy Seventh Annual Report which praised the Prussian system as the best in the world.

Mann acknowledged the growing criticism of the Prussian system. Some claimed it produced “a spirit of blind acquiescence to arbitrary power, in things spiritual as well as temporal – as being, in fine, a system of education, adapted to enslave and not to enfranchise the human mind.”

Mann did not defend Prussia’s desired outcome, but he praised their methods. He explained, “If Prussia can pervert the benign influences of education to the support of arbitrary power, we surely can employ them for the support and perpetuation of republican institutions. A national spirit of liberty can be cultivated more easily than a national spirit of bondage; and if it may be made one of the great prerogatives of education to perform the unnatural and unholy work of making slaves, then surely it must be one of the noblest instrumentalities for rearing a nation of freeman. If a moral power over the understandings and affections of the people may be turned to evil, may it not also be employed for the highest good?”

Mann applauded Prussia’s compulsory education, but he criticized their compulsory religion. He thought it undermined their entire system and perhaps explained why Prussia was still predominantly a backward nation.

Mann’s last Annual Report – the Tweltfth – was published in 1849. It is considered his most profound and had the largest influence on his contemporaries and subsequent educators. Mann championed moral training as the primary objective of education. Combe called it brilliant.

Mann realized moral education was the secret to the Prussian system and the primary reason for their religious training – to drill the masses of men in obedience, so they would automatically bow to their moral authorities, who bowed to their state authorities.

Mann wrote, “Train up a child in the way he should go, and when he is old he will not depart from it.” Our progressive leaders wanted to raise loyal citizens who trusted their authorities, respected the laws, and obeyed the experts.

Before Mann’s reforms, the literacy rate in Massachusetts was over ninety percent. In Boston, it approached one hundred percent. Unlike their mother country in England, where educational opportunities were limited to the often-lazy sons of the aristocracy, in Massachusetts, there were numerous opportunities to learn. Education began early in the home and the fields. Children learned how to read from their parents, who considered it their moral duty so their children could read the Bible.

There was further homeschooling – or self-education – through the books of public circulating libraries. According to Mann, in 1839 there were ten circulating libraries with twenty-eight thousand volumes. Lyceums maintained over one hundred libraries. And Sunday school libraries were estimated to contain one hundred and fifty thousand volumes.

There were numerous private libraries but access depended on the whims of the benefactors. Classically trained tutors were also available but limited.

There were long-standing community schools established by state law and managed by the local authorities. Some communities had neglected their schools. Mann often publicized these failures. But most communities prioritized their support of local education.

There were public and private grammar schools or prep-schools for college. The private schools were expensive, but even the poorest among the people who showed promise could receive the help of a sponsoring patron or a scholarship.

After 1824, when Massachusetts passed an amendment that released all but seven towns from their requirement to support a grammar school, the public grammar schools were gradually replaced by private academies. The academies had a broader education than the Latin grammar schools, and their numbers increased dramatically as they responded to the private market. By 1850, there were over four hundred across Massachusetts. After our Civil War, public high schools began to replace these private academies.

To cap the educational system in Massachusetts, there was Harvard College. Any who dreamed of attending only had to study and work hard. Able-minded and ambitious learners would find an opportunity to pursue the highest education.

Colonial education and its post-Revolution system in Massachusetts was perhaps the most successful in the world and offered widespread opportunities because its communities were founded on Christianity.

After Mann’s reforms, literacy plummeted. Mann’s efforts were then duplicated across our country. State Boards of Education cropped up across our nation, which evolved into State Departments of Education, which centralized educational authority and helped create uniformity in the training of teachers and the curriculum.

The Federal government eventually entered the field and consolidated education into a national system.

A republic requires an intelligent people to govern itself. But conversely, the leaders of a democracy desire an uneducated populace who can be manipulated by slogans, bread and circuses, so the demagogs can rule without unrest.

In light of all the failures of today’s system, it might seem surprising that Horace Mann is celebrated today as the father of our American public educational system. Perhaps, as subsequent history reveals, he and his colleagues built our educational system for a democracy, and our republic was in the process of replacement.

As the purpose of education changed from teaching wisdom to training productive workers, the fundamentals had to change to reflect the new secular orientation, including the curriculum, the training of teachers, and the textbooks. Books with a progressive slant became widely dispersed. The old-fashioned trivium that traditionally taught language, logic, and rhetoric was replaced with more practical training. Literacy, understanding, and critical thinking plummeted as American public education began to resemble Prussia’s mass-produced educational system where indoctrination was its central feature.