Common schools

A common school was a public school in the United States during the nineteenth century. Horace Mann (1796-1859) was a strong advocate for public education and the common school. In 1837, the state of Massachusetts appointed Mann as the first secretary of the State Board of Education where he began a revival of common school education, the effects of which extended throughout America during the 19th century.

Common schools originated in New England as community funded instruments of education for all children of the region or neighborhood. These secondary schools furthered the Puritan conformity of the region by institutionalizing religion into the curriculum for the purpose of instilling good morals and obedience in the populace. The 17th century Puritan relied upon Christian organizations, such as the Anglican Society for the Propagation of the Gospel In Foreign Parts, for catechisms as the first grammar books. In most cases, local church clergy handled the responsibility for education in their community. With support from the community and wealthy philanthropists, clergy discerned the curriculum, material, and teachers for common schools throughout the 17th and 18th centuries, ensuring

Religious sensibility of New England education was further augmented by the First Great Awakening. The fiery divine, Rev. Cotton Mather (1663-1728), clarified that the schools had been instruments for maintaining the pre-eminence of the godly. Reflecting this sentiment, in 1742, neighboring Connecticut enacted a law restricting New Light schools during the First Great Awakening. The law restricted, "the erecting of any other schools, which are not under the establishment and inspection aforesaid, may tend to train up youth in ill principles, and practices, and introduce such disorders as may be of fatal consequence to the public peace and weal of this Colony." The cohesive, common culture of the New England communities reflected itself in the propagation of education and proved resilient to attempts to evolve educational orthodoxy in pre-Revolutionary America.

From 1837 until 1848, Horace Mann led the reform on education in Massachusetts as a lawyer, Massachusetts State senator, and the first secretary of the Massachusetts State Board of Education. Mann's struggled to create a universal standard for state education because schools where characterized by their regional and communal differences. State congressman James G. Carter (1795–1849) explained that the state shifted responsibility for the preservation classroom standards of the schools to the towns; the towns shifted responsibility to districts; and the districts had shifted it to individuals. In order to influence and educate the public, he published annual reports and founded the Common School Journal to report on Massachusetts' schools. In 1839, the first normal school for teachers is established in Lexington Massachusetts in an effort to produce standardized, methodological teaching.

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