Horace Mann

Horace Mann (1796-1859) was an educator and politician who helped set up the first public schools in the United States. He did this in the state of Massachusetts. Mann personally visited every school in the state to inspect it. He later became the first president of Antioch College in Ohio. “Our means of education,” he stated, “are the grand machinery by which the ‘raw material’ of human nature can be worked up into inventors and discoverers, into skilled artisans and scientific farmers.”