First in the Classics in Education Series, this volume offers excerpts from Horace Mann's famous annual reports with an eye to their relevance to today's educational problems. "This series presents the sources of the American educational heritage. There could be no more appropriate beginning than a volume of selections from Horace Mann's reports (1834-1848) to the Massachusetts Board of Education. As the commanding figure of the early public school movement, Mann more than anyone articulated the nineteenth-century American faith in education. His work still stands as the classic statement of the relationship between freedom, popular education, and republican government." --From the Foreword by Lawrence A. Cremin