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In the mid-1800's very few children were going to school due to high cost. Only wealthy parents could afford to send their child to school and teachers received very little pay. Horace Mann led efforts to change this. He spoke about the importance of public education and served as head of the state board of education in Massachusetts.

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Mann guided the citizens to vote for paying taxes in order to open more schools and pay teachers. People saw education as a way to solve poverty and crime in society. Horace became known as "father of American public schools" and his ideas were embraced by other states.

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American Reform - Education, Society, Religion

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A major reform movement that won widespread support was the effort to make education available to more children. The man who led this movement was Horace Mann, "the father of American public schools." As a boy in Massachusetts, he attended school only 10 weeks a year. The rest of the time, he had to work on the family farm.

Few areas had public schools--schools paid for by taxes. Wealthy parents sent their children to private school or hired tutors at home. On the frontier, 60 children might attend a part-time, one-room school. Their teachers had limited education and received little pay. Most children simply did not go to school. In the cities, some poor children stole, destroyed property, and set fires. Reformers believed that education would help these children escape poverty and become good citizens.

In Massachusetts, Horace Mann became the state's supervisor of education. The citizens voted to pay taxes to build better schools, to pay teachers higher salaries and to establish special training schools for teachers. In addition, Mann lengthened the school year to 6 months and made improvements in school curriculum. By the mid-1800s, most states had accepted three basic principles of public education: that school should be free and supported by taxes, that teachers should be trained and that children should be required to attend school.

By 1850, many states in the North and West used Mann's ideas. But America still did not offer education to everyone. Most high schools and colleges did not admit females. When towns did allow African Americans to attend school, most made them go to separate schools that received less money. Education for women did make some progress. In 1837, Ohio's Oberlin College became the first college to accept women, in addition to men. In 1837, Mary Lyon founded Mount Holyoke, teh nation's first permanent women's college.

Some reformers focused on teaching people with disabilities. Thomas Galludet, who developed a method to education people who were hearing impaired, opened the Hartford School for the Deaf in Connecticut in 1817. At about the same time, Dr. Samuel Howe advanced the cause of those who were visually impaired. He developed books with large raised letters that people with sigh impairments could "read" with their fingers. Howe headed the Perkins Institute, a schools for the blind, in Boston.

8th Grade Final Exam in 1895

ATTITUDES TOWARDS EDUCATION "'...And looky here - you drop that school, you hear? I'll learn people to bring up a boy to put on airs over his own father and let on to be better'n what he is. You lemme catch you fooling around that school again, you hear? Your mother couldn't read, and she couldn't write, nuther, before she died. None of the family couldn't before they died. I can't; and here you're a-swelling yourself up like this. I ain't the man to stand it - you hear?...'"

Eighty years later "'Teach me?'I said in surprise. "He hasn't taught me anything. Miss Caroline. Atticus ain't got time to teach me anything," I added, when Miss Caroline smiled and shook her head. "Why, he's so tired at night he just sits in the livingroom and reads.'"

To Kill a Mockingbird was written about the 1930s. Like Huckleberry Finn's father, Scout's father Atticus Finch did not go to school.

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn was written about a time during the middle of the 1800s when many people were not able to get a formal education. Huck's father told Huck what he thought about school learning.

"I suppose she chose me because she knew my name; as I read the alphabet a faint line appeared between her eyebrows, and after making me read most of My First Reader and the stock market quotations from The Mobile Register aloud, she discovered that I was literate and looked at me with more than faint distaste. Miss Caroline told me to tell my father not to teach me any more, it would interfere with my reading.

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A major reform movement that won widespread support was the effort to make education available to more children. The man who led this movement was Horace Mann, "the father of American public schools." As a boy in Massachusetts, he attended school only 10 weeks a year.