Horace Mann’s vision “a fading dream.”
Although it was difficult at times, Horace Mann succeeded in persuading a majority of his contemporaries that free schools with trained teachers could inculcate desirable social values and simultaneously provide a practical education leading to prosperous and constructive citizenship. Today’s educators are limited to a hope that their proposals might bring about a slight improvement on next year’s state achievement tests or raise their district’s high school graduation rate. The possibility of achieving consensus about the content and promise of education is a fading dream.
(Sybil Eakin, Giants of American Education: Horace Mann, from the Quarterly for Education and Technology, Vol. 9, Summer 2000. )
