Remembering the Lessons of Horace Mann

Here’s a blurb from the Writer’s Almanac:

It’s the birthday of Horace Mann, born in Franklin, Massachusetts (1796). He was the first great American advocate of public education. He believed that, in a democratic society, education should be free and universal. He was fiercely opposed to slavery, and toward the end of his life, he was the president of Antioch College, a new institution committed to coeducation and equal opportunity for all students, black and white.

Two months before he died, he said in a speech to the graduating class: “I beseech you to treasure up in your hearts these, my parting words: Be ashamed to die until you have won some victory for humanity.”

Have you ever come across so many good ideas in one place?  Here we have the concepts of:

• The value of education generally

• Education as a necessary condition for a functioning democracy

• A spirit of equality, and the suggestion of women’s rights

• An exhortation that we have a duty to improve the world around us

Perhaps the last of the four is the single greatest.  How many people think that way today, in the face of a culture that reminds us at every turn that the key measure of a successful life means lots of money?  What a tragedy.