Packed and stowed like merchandise between unventilated decks, so close that the tempest without could not ruffle the pestilential air within, the voyage was begun.
Horace Mann
The Public Record
Horace Mann was an American educational reformer, abolitionist and Whig politician known for his commitment to promoting public education; he is thus also known as The Father of American Education. In 1848, after public service as Secretary of the Massachusetts State Board of Education, Mann was elected to the United States House of Representatives (1848–1853). From September 1852 to his death in 1859, he served as President of Antioch College.
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The aged and the infant she left for the vultures; but the strong men and the strong women she drove, scourged and bleeding, to the shore.
She set the continent a-flame, that she might seize the affrighted inhabitants as they ran shrieking from their blazing hamlets.
She broke into the Ethiop’s home, as a wolf into a sheepfold at midnight.
She made its people her prey, and the unwilling colonies her market-place.
One wants the plain, sinewy, Saxon tongue to tell of deeds that should have shamed devils.
Hence this unsightly wound, that affrights whoever beholds it.
Whence came this deformity on her otherwise fair and celestial countenance?
Whenever her votaries would approach her to worship, they have been fain to draw a veil over one part of her visage, to conceal its hideousness.
But in the divine face of our liberty there has been one foul, demoniac feature.
We have not only won freedom for ourselves, but we have taught its sacred lessons to others.
With a somewhat too boastful spirit, perhaps, have we challenged the admiration of the world for our devotion to liberty; but an enthusiasm for the rights of man is so holy a passion, that even its excesses are not devoid of the beautiful.
Amid the storms of freedom were we cradled; in the struggles of freedom have our joints been knit; on the rich aliment of freedom have we grown to our present stature.
Greece coveted the arts; Rome gloried in war; but liberty has been the goddess of our idolatry.
No man can be a patriot who feels neither joy nor shame at the idea of the honor or the infamy which his age and his country shall leave behind them.
No man can have any self-respect, who is not solicitous about his posthumous reputation.
Ignorance, superstition, vulgarity, passion, and perhaps impurity, are the breasts at which they nurse.
Who has the custody of children during this ductile, forming, receptive period of life,--a period when the mind absorbs whatever is brought into contact with it?
Who, at the south, administers this early knowledge,--these ideas, these views, that have such sovereign efficacy in the formation of adult character?
It has been thought by many educators and metaphysicians, that children learn as much before the age of seven years as ever afterwards.
What West Point has been to our armies in Mexico, that, and more than that, good schools would be to the intelligence and industrial prosperity of our country.
But it comes because, in one quarter, the common atmosphere is vivified with knowledge, electric with ideas, while slavery gathers its Bœotian fogs over the other.
All this proceeds from no superiority of natural endowment on the one side, or inferiority on the other.
With the exception of New Orleans, (whose free schools were commenced and have been presided over by a Massachusetts man,) and three or four other cities, all the libraries in the public schools of the slave states could be carried in a…
The private schools of the south divide men into patricians and plebeians; so that, in the latter, a nuisance grows out of education itself.
Politicians like Horace Mann
