If the #stampoftheday posts were like the Miller Analogies Test, I might have started today’s post by asking “George Washington Carver is to peanuts as Horace Mann is to what?”

The answer would have been something like “education” though “schools” also would have been acceptable.

That’s because Horace Mann, who is pictured on today’s #stampoftheday, was—and still is –known (often vaguely) for his work promoting public education. As Elwood P. Cubberly (now there’s a name), who was dean of the Stanford Graduate School of Education wrote in 1919: “No one did more than [Mann] to establish in the minds of the American people the conception that education should be universal, non-sectarian, free, and that its aims should be social efficiency, civic virtue, and character, rather than mere learning or the advancement of sectarian ends.”

His reputation was such that Mann is pictured on a 1-cent stamp issued on March 14, 1940 that was part of the 35 “Famous Americans” series of stamps, which included five stamps picturing educators. The 2-cent stamp in that series, which honored Mark Hopkins, president of Williams College from 1836 to 1872, also was issued on March 14, 1940. In addition to Mann and Hopkins, the other educators honored on the stramps were Charles Eliot, who had been president of Harvard University; Frances Willard, who had been dean of women at Northwestern University and also a leader of the suffrage and temperance movement, and Booker T. Washington, the first president of the Tuskegee Institute (and the first Black person to appear on an American postage stamp).

Mann was born in Franklin, Massachusetts, a town about 40 miles southwest of Boston. He had little formal schooling but made extensive use of the town’s library, which was the first public library in America. (Apparently, the founders of the town, which is named for Ben Franklin, wrote asking Franklin for a church bell. Instead he sent 116 books to the town, which decided to lend them, free of charge, to the town’s residents.)

Brother-in-law of Nathaniel Hawthorne and close friend of Samuel Gridley Howe, Mann was well connected to the cultural and political elite of New England. In the 1820s and 1830s, he served as state representative and state senator before being appointed secretary of the newly created Massachusetts Board of Education in 1837.

As a page about Mann on the website for “Only a Teacher,” a series of PBS documentaries, notes, “Mann used his position to enact major educational reform. He spearheaded the Common School Movement, ensuring that every child could receive a basic education funded by local taxes. His influence soon spread beyond Massachusetts as more states took up the idea of universal schooling.”

The site further explains that “Mann’s commitment to the Common School sprang from his belief that political stability and social harmony depended on education: a basic level of literacy and the inculcation of common public ideals. He declared, ‘Without undervaluing any other human agency, it may be safely affirmed that the Common School…may become the most effective and benignant of all forces of civilization.'” Public education, Mann believed, was a key to societal well-being, because, he observed, “A republican form of government, without intelligence in the people, must be, on a vast scale, what a mad-house, without superintendent or keepers, would be on a small one.”

Mann summarized his views in six principals about public education in “The Common School Journal,” which he founded in 1838. These were:

1. That public should no longer remain ignorant;
2. That such education should be paid for, controlled, and sustained by an interested public;
3. That this education will be best provided in schools that embrace children from a variety of backgrounds;
4. That this education must be non-sectarian;
5. That this education must be taught using the tenets of a free society; and
6. That education should be provided by well-trained, professional teachers.

It’s hard to argue with the general thrust of his efforts to build and sustain public support for public education. And yet, there are some troubling legacies. As a web page for the Disability History Museum notes, while “some historians consider his movement as an important step toward a more open and fluid society in which merit would trump birth [other] historians view the common school as a rather blunt tool for social control, one that tended both to stifle intellectual curiosity and to suppress diversity.” The site also notes that “for people with disabilities, Mann legacy is especially troubling,” because Mann was a strong supporter of oral education and sharp critic of sign language,

In a 2010 book “Horace Mann’s Troubling Legacy: The Education of Democratic Citizens,” political scientist Bob Pepperman Taylor (who apparently was a classmate of mine at Wesleyan University) echoes some of the criticisms. As the University Press of Kansas webpage on the book explains, “by conceiving of public schooling as serving primarily political ends [Mann] fostered an enduring tension between educational values and political purposes….Mann’s approach to civic education marginalized the role of schools in training the intellect, and that this anti-intellectual component has been retained in the current model of schooling in the United States….[And] Mann’s schooling model promotes moral certainty and political consensus over intellectual doubt and political disagreement-an imbalance that erodes and weakens both educational and democratic ends.”

Nevertheless, at this moment in time-when we are seeing the cost that not going to school has imposed on many children – it seems especially timely to remember Mann for his ardent advocacy of public education.

Be well, stay safe, “embrace children from a variety of backgrounds,” fight for justice, and work for peace.