Re-Examining School in Tradition
The Misnomer of Mann’s “Common School”
During the mid-19th and early 20th centuries, the American education reformer Horace Mann sought to integrate widespread education into the national consciousness.
At the center of his efforts, Mann stressed the importance of the “common school”: a government-funded institution for disseminating knowledge and virtue among future generations of the new Republic. However, through the lens of black education, realizations of Mann’s “common school” suggest that the adjective “common” is a misnomer.
In terms of access and control, tensions between black and white communities and well as tensions within the black community over education during this era pose a direct challenge to any notion of the “common” as “shared” or “universal.”
Thus, although late 18th and early 19th century education reformers promoted the “common school” through an inclusive ideal, exclusion in the Common School Era suggests that a new definition of “common” is needed, one that…
