(Franklin, Massachusetts,1796 – Yellow Spring, Ohio,1859)

Horace Mann was a true self-made man. The son of a farmer, poor, an orphan, and self-taught, he became the preeminent reformer of public education in the United States. As an anti-slavery advocate, member of the Senate, and facing a majority conservative opposition, he pushed for free and universal education. He proposed replacing corporal punishment with the moral authority of the teachers over students. He argued that public education was the best way to turn marginalized children into disciplined, judicious citizens.

In 1830 he married Charlotte Messer, who died two years later. A widower at 36, he moved to a Boston boarding house that brought together the intellectual elite: among them, the philosopher R.W. Emerson; suffragette Margaret Fuller and the Peabody sisters, who embodied the new generation of women in the U.S. Mary Peabody, a teacher at a ground-breaking experimental school in Boston, fell in love with the brilliant guest. It took him ten years to reciprocate her feelings. They were married in 1843 and on their honeymoon visited prisons, reformatories, asylums, and schools for the deaf in Europe. In Prussia, they visited schools shaped by the Enlightenment ideas of Swiss educator Johann H. Pestalozzi. This enlightened ideology, similar to Mann’s, eliminated the practice of memorization and the separation of sexes; it posited that education was the best tool to eradicate poverty, and proposed providing trade courses for orphans and beggars.

Mann first served as the Secretary of the Massachusetts Board of Education, then as a member of Congress. He succeeded in increasing the years of schooling and implemented bold reforms, as he advocated that “Education… is the great equalizer of the conditions of men”. In Lexington, on July 3, 1839, he founded the first teacher training school in the country, which later served as a model throughout all the states. Considered the father of public education in the United States, his political and ideological influence was also decisive in building the foundations for schools in another young nation located in the south of the continent. In spite of the challenges it faced in Argentina, Horace Mann's literacy project triggered a cultural transformation, a change in focus towards new types of social identities, and brought about unavoidable rites of passage from a colonial past towards the structuring of the country.

Text by Laura Ramos, author of "The young ladies, History of the American teachers that Sarmiento brought to Argentina in the 19th Century", Feria del Libro Critics First Prize 2021-2022. Publisher Lumen-Penguin Random House 2021.