Annual Forth Report By Horace Mann Summary

Horace Mann’s Annual Forth Report argues for the improving of the standards of education. Mann believed female educators, moralized citizens, and teacher standards were all essential to improving the standards. Mann states the “qualifications of teachers, hold a place, second in importance to none” (1841, p. 44). All three ideologies intertwine to create and support the Native Protestant Ideology and the Common School Movement that Kaestle describes. The first belief that aligns with Native Protestant Ideology is the belief of employing female educators. He writes “females are incomparably better teachers for young children than males, cannot admit of a doubt” (Mann, 1841, p. 46). He believes that females can offer young children something

Mann argues that in order for society to flourish, we need to have higher teacher standards and teachers need to be able to teach all students. He advocates for a committee that advises districts to employ only good teachers and to do so, they need start picking teachers early in the season. Mann writes that the district has the welfare of all towns equally in heart, and that “any one district should be subjected to the necessity of employing an incompetent teacher, is what he deplores” (1841, p. 47). Mann also writes that teachers should be able teach all students. Mann writes that it is “hard that a community has should be taxed to pay for having the minds of their children darkened or perverted” (1841, p. 44). Teachers need to be able to have multiple methods of teaching students otherwise society won’t gain from them. Kaestle agrees with this in the fact that Native Protestant ideology was focused on uniformity of schools. Kaestle wrote that the common-school movement focused on higher teacher wages, uniform curriculum, and other reforms that brought inconsistency to many institutions. Kaestle stated the common school movement was a program dedicated to the assimilation and standardization of “public education in different communities increasingly similar as well as more substantial” (1983, p. 135). Furthermore, they wanted to make it more “responsive to the political, economic, and cultural tasks that Anglo-American Protestant educational leaders believed were necessary to preserve and improve their society” (1983, p. 135). The common school movement was formed in order to preserve the protestant ideology and to be able to teach the society using those