Horace Mann's Troubling Legacy

In Horace Mann's Troubling Legacy, Bob Pepperman Taylor posits a tension present in public schools between intellectual values and political purposes, particularly citizenship education. He argues that this tension dates to the early days of the common school movement and the influence of Horace Mann as the chief architect of that movement. A political scientist, Taylor offers a theoretical analysis of Mann's work and its implications for subsequent generations of educational thinkers. Divided into five chapters, the book situates Mann's educational agenda within the theoretical challenges that democracy posed for the founders—that political equality can lead not only to political chaos but also to moral and intellectual chaos. Mann, like many since the founding of the United States, believed that only universal public education could alleviate the social and economic inequalities that fractured democratic community. Taylor discusses these concerns, and the intellectual milieu of republicanism, Congregationalism, Unitarianism, and phrenology that informed Mann's ideas about human nature and the processes of learning

Citizenship · Democracy · Democratic Education · Environmental ethics · Political science · Politics · Social science · Sociology · Law · Philosophy · Religious Education and Schools