Victor Cousin and the Cause of National Education 

 
Stephen Tomlinson 

University of Alabama 

 

Victor Cousin’s Report on Prussian schooling served as a blueprint for the “Guizot Law” of 1833, which 

established a system of elementary education across France. Translated into English the following year 

by Sarah Austin, it also played a pivotal role in both the British movement for national education and the 

common school revival that resulted in the establishment of the Massachusetts Board of Education. 

Central to Cousin’s account was a description of Pestalozzian pedagogy and its potential to ensure 

political rights and preserve social order by instilling principles of practical Christianity in the 

population.  This answered the prayer of English reformers facing a volatile working class and American 

clerics concerned by the erosion of religious piety.  But Cousin’s Report also extolled a second 

educational aim; the humanistic concept of Bildung, which would become the guiding ideal for the more 

philosophically minded John Stuart Mill (Austin’s closest associate in reform) and Edward Everett, the 

Massachusetts governor who shepherded the Board of Education into law.  Taken together, these sister 

concepts reveal the extensive impact of German ideas about history, culture, and the importance of 

education for the progress of civilization. 

 

Victor Cousin’s 1832 Report on the State of 

Public Instruction in Prussia is without doubt one 

of the most influential documents in the history of 

education. More than any other work it provided 

French, English, and American reformers with a 

compelling model of efficient schooling and an 

authoritative justification for Enlightenment ideas 

about the role of education in the historical 

advancement of culture and civilization.   

On both sides of the Atlantic leading 

political and intellectual figures drew upon 

Cousin’s vivid and detailed account of German 

schooling to justify government involvement in 

public education. It was instrumental in the 

framing of the Guizot Law of 1833 that established 

elementary schools across France and played a key 

role in the common school crusade that resulted in 

the establishment of the Massachusetts Board of 

Education in 1837. Translated by Sarah Austin, the 

Report was also central to the 1830s campaign for 

national schooling in England. In part its appeal lay 

in the practicality of the system, which Cousin 

presented as cheap, efficient, and easily adaptable 

to other political contexts. Comprehensive tables 

recording student attendance and state expenditure 

demonstrated that in a largely Protestant country 

similar in size to Britain the entire school age 

population was being educated for less than 

£50,000 per year. But the chief message of the 

Report was less the cost of public schooling than 

the character of the instruction provided. The 

Prussian teacher, Cousin explained, had the power 

to transform society. Over the previous century, a 

new philosophy of education had given rise to 

pedagogic methods that could meet the needs of the 

modern nation state. If the mind and character of 

the population were elevated to accept the guidance 

of an intellectually informed class of moral leaders, 

the rights of citizenship could be married with the 

necessity of order to produce a rational society 

capable of fostering material progress and the 

advancement of Christian civilization.   

What should not be lost in this account are 

the underlying commitments of those who 

embraced Cousin’s arguments. The Report was 

clearly written to serve a political agenda itself 

informed by the German Enlightenment. Cousin 

had spent the best part of two decades studying 

German philosophy and was very familiar with the 

ideas of its most progressive thinkers. Indeed, it 

was while accompanying Hegel to Cologne—on 

the latter’s return from Paris in the fall of 1827—

that he first met Sarah Austin. Like Hegel, Cousin 

(1852) wanted to establish a rationally ordered 



 

 

64 
 

secular state. A new epoch was at hand, he 

explained the following year, when religious 

intuition would be superseded by reason. Critical 

reflection and the rule of intelligence were now the 

spirit of the age and France had to develop an 

informed leadership equipped with the intellectual 

skills to guide its development. This did not mean 

any loss of faith; reason would convert the “truths 

offered to it by religion into its own substance . . . 

it destroys not faith . . . [but] illuminates it and 

promotes its growth, and raises it gently from the 

twilight of the symbol to the full light of pure 

thought” (p. 22). Evidently, he envisioned the same 

relationship writ large in the state. Ever the student 

of Plato, social order was to be achieved by 

harmonizing the religious feelings of the working 

classes with the expert guidance of a moral and 

intellectual elite.  

While this idealized picture hardly 

reflected the reality of Prussian schooling in the 

early 1830s, Cousin’s (1834) Report, with its clear 

and crisp description of legal statutes, compelling 

statistics, and detailed accounts of institutional 

practices proved a highly authoritative resource for 

those who embraced a similar vision of reform. 

Most importantly, he justified the establishment of 

Pestalozzian normal schools while calming fears 

about expenditure and the prospect of social 

levelling. This dovetailed perfectly with Austin’s 

concerns about the provision and quality of 

monitorial instruction for the volatile populations 

of Britain’s industrialized town and cities. It also 

spoke to the problems of the American common 

school, which for New England divines like 

Charles Brooks was failing in its mission to impart 

basic religious principles. But the notion of 

practical Christianity Cousin imported from 

Prussia also pointed to a second, more profound 

educational aim; the humanistic concept of 

Bildung, which would become the guiding ideal for 

more the philosophically minded John Stuart Mill 

(Austin’s closest associate in reform) and Edward 

Everett, the Massachusetts governor who 

shepherded the Board of Education and America’s 

first Normal schools into law. 

 

The Guizot Law  

Cousin arrived in Berlin in June 1831. 

Warmly received by the Minister of Education, 

Karl von Altenstein, he was assigned a staff 

assistant to explain all the legal statues governing 

the Prussian system. He reports witnessing “the 

most secret workings of the administration” and 

being conducted around educational 

establishments of the city, from elementary schools 

to the University. He also visited the large Burgher 

Normal School in Potsdam. Throughout he 

followed the same course of action; “first to 

procure the laws or regulations, and render myself 

perfectly master of them; next, to verify them by an 

accurate and detailed inspection” (p. 3). He 

reviewed hundreds of documents but admitted that 

the primary object of his Report was “the 

legislative project of 1819 which has the force of 

law, and regulates the present order of things 

throughout the country” ensuring, he noted, the 

near complete education of the nation’s children (p. 

25). Achieving a perfect balance of class interests, 

all parties—local, state, and religious—worked 

toward a single end, “the civilization of the people” 

(p. 106). There was “no injudicious spirit of 

centralization or of official despotism … almost 

everything is left to the parochial, departmental, or 

provincial authorities” (p. 106). Even local clergy 

worked in concert with municipal officials in the 

management of public education. Moreover, unlike 

the abstract blueprints of the early French 

Republic, the law was built upon practices that had 

evolved since the time of the Reformation. 

“Founded on reality and experience,” it 

“methodized” proven traditions producing “the 

happiest results with extraordinary rapidity” (p. 

108).  

Mindful that France lacked such historical 

precedents, Cousin explained how easily this well-

oiled machine could be adapted to meet the distinct 

character of the French people. Most important for 

Cousin was the absolute need to follow Prussia in 

the provision of instruction suited to the different 

ranks of society. First and foremost, an intellectual 

elite had to be schooled in lycées styled on the 

German Gymnasium. France might claim 



 

 

65 
 

superiority in mathematics and the physical 

sciences, but it must also look to the classics. 

These, he maintained, “were without any 

comparison, the most important of all” (p. 114). 

For it was through language, literature, history, and 

philosophy of the ancients that students gained the 

clearest knowledge of human nature. Of course, 

such studies were not suitable for the entire 

population. As in the Prussian Elementarschulen, 

those at the lower end of the social ladder would be 

better served by an education which concentrated 

on basic skills and the cultivation of religious 

sentiments. The urban middle-class presented a 

different problem. Not only was classical learning 

irrelevant to their future rank and occupation, it 

would inevitably generate false ambitions, 

rendering them discontent with their lot in life. It 

was thus “of the highest importance to create in 

France, under one name or another, burgher 

schools” equipped to impart more extensive and 

useful knowledge (p. 119). 

The whole enterprise turned on a new kind 

of teacher, the product of the Pestalozzian 

seminaries. Trained in methods “adapted to the 

natural growth and improvement of the human 

mind” they led the child “by enlightened 

observation and their own experience to simple and 

lucid principles” (p. 65). This did not mean the 

establishment of an expensive new estate. Prussia 

was careful not to remunerate its teachers above 

others of their social station. Their service to the 

public good was an act of charity, conducted in the 

“spirit of poverty, humility, courageous 

resignation, and modest dignity, which 

Christianity, rightly understood and wisely taught, 

can alone give to the teachers of the people” (p. 

291). 

Jurgen Herbst (1991) raises the question of 

whether Cousin was misled, confused, or even 

deceptive in his employment of “the legislative 

project of 1819,” Süvern’s abortive scheme to 

enact a unified and progressive system of 

schooling. Certainly, Cousin (1834) quotes the 

plan extensively and even concludes that “the 

different stages” form “a single great establishment 

of national education, the system of which is one” 

(p. 52). But he then qualifies this by explaining that 

while “intimately connected together,” each branch 

“pursues its own peculiar end”—with the clear 

implication, for the common good (p. 52). 

Accordingly, it is hard not to conclude that 

combined with his slippery language—claiming 

“the force of law”—Cousin used Süvern’s text to 

defend his own deep-seated philosophical 

convictions and promote the political agenda of 

Louis Philippe’s government, which in the wake of 

the July Revolution, viewed the constitutional 

promise of public education as an immediate 

priority.   

Professor of philosophy at the Ecole 

Normale, Cousin studied in Germany during the 

1810s before returning to offer the first lectures on 

Kant in France. His own eclectic synthesis 

“spiritualism” started with the free activity of the 

human will and stressed the inner development of 

the mind through engagement with the truths of 

diverse traditions. He translated Plato into French 

and shared the neo-humanist passion for all things 

Greek. Given his relationship with Hegel and other 

prominent German thinkers during the 1820s, it is 

safe to assume he was well versed in the concept of 

Bildung and the aims of Prussian education. As for 

knowledge of politics, the six months he spent in a 

Berlin jail during 1824 charged with subversive 

activities no doubt provided a practical lesson that 

the conservative forces reigning in Germany were 

no less potent than those currently dominant in 

France.   

François Guizot (1787-1874) , author of the 

1833 law, shared Cousin’s intellectual and political 

sympathies. After graduating from the University 

of Geneva, he served as tutor to the children of 

Albert Stapfer, the former minister of the Helvetic 

government charged with establishing a system of 

public education in the new Swiss nation. Stapfer 

had set Pestalozzi up at Burgdorf, and later as 

ambassador to France, helped promote his 

pedagogy among the Paris literati—even 

recommending it to Napoleon (Johnson, 1963). 

With Stapfer’s support Guizot soon established 

himself as one of France’s most promising writers, 

publishing numerous articles on German literary 



 

 

66 
 

and philosophical thought. In 1812, at the age of 

25, he was appointed chair of modern history at the 

Sorbonne. His major works were clearly 

influenced by the historicist approach of his 

German peers. Ignoring the particularities of the 

past, he focused on the development of social 

institutions and their influence on the human 

faculties. In this context, education was all 

important; indeed, as editor of Annales de 

l'Éducation between 1811 and 1815 he and his wife 

were instrumental in the popularization of 

Pestalozzian and other international approaches to 

childcare and instruction. By 1816 Guizot had 

joined the Doctrinaires, a centrist party committed 

to forging a middle path between the political 

rights promised by the Revolution and the social 

structures of the Ancien Régime. Envisioning a 

secular, expert led state united by a sense of civic 

responsibility and national loyalty, he helped draft 

a plan for a national system of education in which 

individuals would be schooled for life within the 

largely impermeable bands of a fixed hierarchical 

order. Local authorities were to replace the 

centralized bureaucracy of the Empire and infuse 

wisdom throughout the body politic.   

Out of favor during the Bourbon 

Restoration, in 1828 Guizot and Cousin cemented 

their standing as leaders of the liberal cause in a 

celebrated series of public lectures. Two years 

later, in the aftermath of the July Revolution, 

Cousin was made a Peer of France and appointed 

to the Council for Public Instruction. Guizot 

became the Minister of Education in 1832. 

Adamant that the nation had to be regulated by 

reason rather than force, by July of the following 

year, he had carried the majority of Cousin’s 

recommendations into law determined to establish 

what he termed “a government of minds” (Johnson, 

1963). Cousin, who remained on the powerful 

Council for Public Instruction while serving as 

director of the Ecole Normale oversaw the reform 

of secondary education along the lines of the 

Prussian Gymnasium, determined to produce “a 

legitimate aristocracy” for the French nation 

(Goldstein 1968).   

 

Sarah Austin 

The extraordinary task of rendering a 

French government report into English must be put 

into context. Close friends and next-door neighbors 

of James Mill and his family, Sarah Austin and her 

husband John were integral members of the 

intellectual circle that followed the teachings of the 

radical utilitarian theorist Jeremy Bentham. John 

Austin, a legal scholar, taught Mill’s son (the future 

philosopher John Stuart Mill) law; Sarah—whom 

he would refer to his as his “Mutterlein”—tutored 

him in German. Two foundational principles 

underwrote the group’s political agenda; an 

expanded franchise and the promotion of education 

so that an informed electorate could make 

intelligent judgments about their best interests. 

John Arthur Roebuck brought their case for public 

schooling before the first Reformed Parliament in 

July 1833. Drawing upon the example of Prussia 

he sought to minimize questions about personal 

liberty and confessional difference while stressing 

education as the panacea for the pressing social 

problems that beset the country. While in favor of 

expanding public instruction, the Commons found 

Roebuck’s vague and expansive plan—along with 

the “regimental” example of Prussia—ill-suited to 

free institutions and religious character of the 

nation (Hansard, 1833). The incursion of the state 

would only undermine the voluntary efforts to 

expand schooling; it was far better the majority 

agreed to offer incentives for individual initiative 

to than to hand the cause of education over to an 

impersonal bureaucracy. The best Roebuck could 

achieve was the promise of a Select Committee to 

investigate the matter in greater detail.   

Determined to raise understanding and 

rally public support, Sarah Austin (1833a) 

published a detailed account of the Prussian system 

in the October issue of the Foreign Quarterly 

Review countering critics on the principle of 

compulsion, the adequacy of the free market, and 

the religious character of instruction. In the 

interim—following the arguments of Henry 

Brougham, the Whig government’s leading voice 

on education—a grant of £20,000 was approved to 

support the monitorial schools of the Church of 



 

 

67 
 

England affiliated National School Society (NS) 

and the non-sectarian British and Foreign School 

Society (BFSS). Austin (1833b) was livid. Given 

the alarming conditions of urban and agricultural 

life, government had to recognize its fundamental 

responsibility to improve the mind and morals of 

the population. Adding a postscript to her article, 

she complained about the lack of oversight and 

accountability for the use of public money. 

 

Without some central authority to 

ensure that the schools newly built shall 

belong to the public, and that the system of 

teaching followed in them shall be 

deserving of approbation, all grants of 

public money for the education of the poor 

will either be wholly wasted, or so 

misapplied, that they will only produce a 

very small fraction of the good with might, 

under a better system, be derived from 

them. (p. 496) 

 

The following year, intent on detailing this better 

system, she published her translation of Cousin’s 

(1834) Report together with a rather more dramatic 

Preface that emphasized the power of pedagogic 

methods to transform the character of the lower 

orders.  

“Society,” she insisted, “is no longer a calm 

current, but a tossing sea. Reverence for tradition, 

for authority is gone. In such a state of things, who 

can deny the absolute necessity for national 

education?” (p. ix). This did not mean leveling; like 

Prussia and France, Britain could school the 

masses to accept their place under the leadership of 

wise and virtuous elite. The key to this progressive 

reform was a new breed of schoolteacher trained to 

raise the humanity of the child. Instruction had to 

be transformed from an economy of memorization 

and compliance to one of understanding and 

prudent judgment. Without nurturing unrealistic 

aspirations, she insisted that our “humbler friends” 

could develop “gentle and kindly sympathies,” a 

“sense of self-respect,” and even appreciate the 

“nobility of virtue” (p. xvii). The intellectual 

faculties could be trained to bring understanding of 

the world in which they lived, and habits could be 

formed for the “business of life, so as to extract the 

greatest possible portion of comfort out of small 

means.” (p. xvii).   

It was evident that such worthy aims could 

never be realized by the mechanical methods 

employed in the monitorial schools of the NS and 

the BFSS. The Lancastrian method, she quoted a 

“German writer” (presumably Edward Biber), 

“may be of use in humanizing the lowest mob of 

England ... but where men and Christians are to be 

formed, is defective and ill contrived.” (p. xix). 

Building upon a century of pedagogic science, 

German educators had proven that such mental and 

moral powers could be fashioned by teachers who 

understood how to perfect human nature. In 

contrast to the preparation of monitorial masters, 

where the machinery of the system did the work of 

instruction, this would require the establishment of 

teaching seminaries. For those who questioned the 

expense or feared the specter of a new professional 

class, Austin pointed to the “most affecting, and I 

must say, sublime example” of the spirit inherent 

in the Prussian system, “the little schools for 

training poor schoolmasters in such habits and with 

such feelings as shall fit them to be the useful and 

contented teachers of the humblest cottagers of the 

most miserable villages” (p. xv-xvi). With no 

aspirations of advancement, they labored happily 

in their own poverty, “raised above their poor 

neighbors in education, only that they may become 

the servants of all, and may train the lowliest 

children in a sense of the dignity of man, and the 

beauty of creation, in the love of God and of virtue” 

(p. xvi). 

Grounded in proven and well-accepted 

practices, there was nothing new or experimental 

in this system. The British were simply ignorant of 

the pedagogic advances made on the Continent. An 

extensive passage quoted from James Pillans on 

the history of teacher training from August Francke 

to Pestalozzi demonstrated just how much the 

country had to learn about the art of instruction (p 

xx-xxiv). Whatever concerns might be held about 

Prussian despotism, its schoolmasters had 

perfected the ability to educate even the humblest 



 

 

68 
 

of its population into sensible, independently 

minded, and industrious citizens, able to direct 

their own actions under the guidance of their 

betters. Curiously, Austin did not draw further on 

Biber (1831), biographer and former associate of 

Pestalozzi, now master of the school in Hampstead 

attended by her daughter Lucy. Trained in the 

pietistic theology of Wurttemberg, Biber’s (1830) 

lectures “On Christian Education” not only offered 

an unremitting critique of monitorial instruction 

they provided a detailed outline of the religious 

education promoted by Francke and his followers. 

The mechanical routines of Bell and Lancaster, he 

concluded, operated like “an engine of evil” to 

strengthen base passions and suffocate the good, 

inner spirit of the child. Like Francke, Biber’s 

overriding concern was to overcome Mankind’s 

carnal nature by restoring the intellectual and moral 

powers weakened by the fall of Adam. Employing 

a Christian Philosophy reminiscent of Comenius’ 

Pansophy, he maintained that the study of the 

world and all its contents must be related to the 

purpose of Creation so that the idea of God “as the 

maker and supporter of all things” would “impress 

the child’s mind with that reverential awe, which is 

declared to be ‘the beginning of wisdom’” (p. 253). 

The Holy Word would spark a similar 

transformation of the emotions. Employing the 

inspirational power of Scripture and the living 

example of the savior, the child would be led freely 

and lovingly to embrace Christ as their monarch.   

Like Cousin, Austin insisted that religious 

instruction must be the main tool of elementary 

schooling but struggled to explain how this could 

be achieved by a weak government in the face of 

fierce sectarian rivalries. In contrast to Prussia and 

France where religion operated as an arm of the 

state, intrusion into the domain of the Church only 

invited political ruin. John Stuart Mill’s (1984) 

article, “Reform in Education,” written in 1834 

while vacationing with the Austins in Cornwall, 

illustrates the point. While including a four page 

exert from “On Christian Education” in support of 

Pestalozzian schooling, he studiously avoided the 

theological kernel of Biber’s argument. Although a 

strong supporter of national education, Mill had 

grown up without God and was highly 

uncomfortable with the prospect of religious 

indoctrination. Like his father, he favored more 

extensive instruction in the branches of useful 

knowledge. In any case, stymied by the seemingly 

intractable problems of church and state, his 

attention was focused on an even more pressing 

concern, the education of worthy political leaders.   

The 1830s was a challenging time for the 

Austins.  Struggling to support her intellectually 

brilliant but emotionally troubled husband as his 

academic and legal career faltered, Sarah 

maintained the family finances through the 

translation of German and French works 

(Hamburger & Hamburger, 1985).  In 1836 the 

family moved to Malta when John was offered the 

opportunity to help frame the Maltese Constitution. 

Things did not go well; two years later they were 

back in England.  Then, in 1841 they returned to 

the Continent, first to Dresden and then Paris, 

where in line with her professional interests and 

social proclivities Sarah held court with many of 

Europe’s leading political and intellectual 

figures—Cousin and Guizot included (Goodman, 

2002). Returning to Britain amid the turmoil of the 

1848 Revolution, she continued her work as a 

translator while pursuing her own literary projects, 

and the publication of John’s papers after his death 

in 1859. This included one more work on 

education, a pamphlet on the schooling of working-

class girls—much along the lines of her earlier 

remarks—stressing the moral culture of the 

faculties and useful instruction for the child’s 

appointed station, “lest the seeds of uneasy 

ambitions” be sown evoking “disgusts at the 

realities of life.” (Austin, 1857, p. 5). But Sarah 

(and John) Austin’s contribution to education 

should also be weighed in the light of the 

intellectual influence they had on one of the 

century’s most profound thinkers. For despite John 

Stuart Mill’s coolness to his onetime “Mutterlein,” 

his thought was clearly shaped by German ideas on 

the nature of mind and society imbibed during his 

formative tutelage under the Austins.   

 

From Bentham to Bildung 



 

 

69 
 

In 1826, John Austin journeyed to the 

University of Bonn hoping to broaden his 

knowledge of jurisprudence in preparation for his 

academic appointment at the soon to be opened 

University of London. This two-year sojourn led to 

something of a sea change in his political views. 

By the time Austin returned, Mill (1981a) tells us, 

“the influences of German literature and of the 

German character and state of society had made a 

very perceptible change in his views of life” (p. 

184). Building upon Benthamite foundations, 

Austin solidified his underlying conviction that law 

and politics could be rendered moral sciences with 

principles that ensured the greatest happiness of the 

greatest number. But departing from Bentham’s 

democratic radicalism, he and Sarah came to 

believe that power must be grounded with an 

intellectual class who knew how to guide the state 

and ensure the population’s interests—rather than 

their inclinations—are best served. In short, 

legislators had to lead rather than follow the will of 

the people. “Let them disregard all the clamors 

about tyrannical interference” Sarah Austin (1835) 

wrote, “and remember that it is not the vox populi, 

but the salus populi, which is suprema lex” (p. 

301).   

Reflecting on his own intellectual 

development, Mill (1981a) later confessed that 

John Austin was the person with whom he shared 

“the most points of agreement” (p. 184). 

Convinced that scientific expertise was necessary 

to address complex economic and political 

problems of the day, he came to believe that the 

public must accept the authority of experts on 

matters of social policy much as they did the 

wisdom of physicians on questions of health. “It is 

right,” Mill (1986) argues in “The Spirit of the 

Age,” that  

 

every man should attempt to understand his 

interest and his duty. It is right that he 

should follow his reason as far as his reason 

will carry him, and cultivate the faculty as 

highly as possible. But reason itself will 

teach most men that they must, in the last 

resort, fall back upon the authority of still 

more cultivated minds, as the ultimate 

sanction of the convictions of their reason 

itself. (p. 244) 

 

But society was not developing such 

cultivated minds. Weighing the educational 

achievements of the day, Mill questioned whether 

the “mental light” of the age 

 

has not lost in intensity, at least a part of 

what it has gained in diffusion;” is the 

“march of intellect” not “a march towards 

doing without intellect, and supplying our 

deficiency of giants by the united efforts of 

a constantly increasing multitude of 

dwarfs? (p. 330)  

 

The consequence, he feared, was the ascendency of 

a powerful mindset able to establish a fixed body 

of doctrine and employ institutional practices to 

engineer blind conformity.  

Mill’s worries for the governing leadership 

were motivated by the limits of his own education 

at the hands of his father. Determined to create a 

future philosopher who could continue Bentham’s 

reforms, James Mill immersed his son in an 

extraordinarily demanding course of academic 

study. From Plato to Political Economy, his days 

were spent in the analysis of texts. As a result, Mill 

reports growing up socially and physically 

awkward with little practical knowledge of the 

world. Even more disturbing, his father’s emphasis 

on the abstract and the analytical rendered him 

emotionally insensible. Mill’s (1981a) 

Autobiography thus serves as a Bildungsroman 

recounting his adolescent efforts to refashion 

himself through the education of the sentiments. 

“The maintenance of due balance among the 

faculties, now seemed to me of primary 

importance. The cultivation of the feelings became 

one the cardinal points in my ethical and 

philosophic creed” (p. 118). This project of self-

formation was a central motif of the German 

literature and philosophy popularized in England 

by Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Thomas Carlyle. 

No doubt Sarah Austin—who translated Goethe 



 

 

70 
 

and wrote on the history of German culture—also 

had an influence. But it was Coleridge who spoke 

most directly to Mill’s struggles. Rejecting the 

mechanical associationism of British Empiricism 

for the dynamic philosophy of Kant, Coleridge 

insisted on the primacy of an active, organizing 

subject able to generate meaning and value through 

creative power of imagination. Rather than being 

impressed from without, the development of mind 

and morals had to come from within. The intellect 

would be awakened not by providing 

 

information that can be conveyed into … 

[a] passive Mind … as if the Human Soul 

were a mere repository,” but, as Plato 

showed, by placing it in “such relations of 

circumstance as should gradually excite its 

vegetating and germinating powers to 

produce new fruits of Thought, new 

Conceptions, and Imaginations, and Ideas. 

(Coleridge, 1854, p. 45) 

 

This was the concept of Bildung—growth, 

cultivation, humanization—which Mill, citing the 

influence of Pestalozzi and von Humboldt, 

identified as the “grand, leading principle, towards 

which every argument” of his later philosophical 

masterpiece, On Liberty would converge; “the 

absolute and essential importance of human 

development in its richest diversity” (Mill, 1981a, 

p. 215). 

But what was being done to cultivate the 

powers, perfect the mind, and realize human 

individuality? Even in the great schools Mill 

(1981b) observed in his 1832 essay “On Genius,” 

education was “all cram—Latin cram, 

mathematical cram, literary cram, political cram, 

theological cram, moral cram” (p, 338). This did 

not constitute learning. Knowledge was a personal 

construction that “comes only from within; all that 

comes from without is but questioning, or else it is 

mere authority” (p. 332). Rather than “grinding 

down other men’s ideas to a convenient size, and 

administering them in the form of cram,” he was 

adamant that education must “form the thinking 

faculty itself” (p. 335). Here, as the German neo-

humanists insisted, the moderns had much to learn 

from the ancients. The Athenian Agora was a scene 

of  

perpetual conflict of adverse intellects, 

struggling with each other, or struggling 

with difficulty and necessity. Every man 

had to play his part upon a stage where 

cram was of no use—nothing but genuine 

power would serve his turn. . .. This was the 

education to form great statesmen, great 

orators, great warriors, great poets, great 

architects, great sculptors, great 

philosophers; because, once for all, it 

formed men, and not mere knowledge-

boxes. (p. 336) 

 

Much as von Humboldt had argued for Prussia, 

Mill was adamant that improving the national 

character required leaders with vigorous and 

original intellects. Such powers could only be 

acquired through a secular education—like that of 

Germany and France—which combined freedom 

of thought with a love of truth. Neither condition, 

to his constant distress, seemed remotely likely at 

any level of English schooling. Oxford and 

Cambridge, Eaton and Westminster, he 

complained in 1836, only taught the mechanics of 

Greek and Latin to promote eloquence and 

persuasion (Mill, 1982a). Even more troublingly, 

they demanded blind obedience to the authority of 

the Church. Concerned to make disciples not 

thinkers, learning was reduced to the memorization 

of dogma. His prime concern was the cultivation of 

character.  

Mill recognized how liberal society had 

improved the quality of life, but he also noted its 

tendency to suffocate the higher and broader 

expressions of the mind. Here, in the name of 

culture, he looked to Greek philosophy and 

literature, not as a model to imitate, but a distant 

standpoint from which to question and critique all 

that the modern world takes for granted. To guide 

the nation, future leaders also needed to understand 

the logic of inquiry employed in the physical and 

moral sciences. History was particularly important, 

as it demonstrated the plasticity of human nature 



 

 

71 
 

and the influence of institutions. Finally, and 

radically, he also called for the introduction of the 

fine arts hoping that by elevating the sentiments 

and refining taste, the university might fuel visons 

of a more noble life. Adapted to the national 

context, the parallels with von Humboldt’s ideals 

of Wissenschaft and Bildung are unmistakable.  

 

Education as a National Object 

Written between March and September of 

1834, Mill’s (1982b) “Notes on the Newspapers” 

in the Monthly Register record his thoughts on the 

second sitting of the Reformed Parliament—a body 

he had little respect for. The country needed rulers 

“who can teach us what we should demand,” but 

the current house was composed of men who “have 

neither the intellect, the knowledge, the energy, the 

courage, nor even the wish” to guide the people. 

Rather than leading the nation, the nation was 

leading them! (p. 154). Their duty to institute a 

national system of education was a case in point. 

Together with “Reform in Education” and a short 

review of Cousin’s Report in the Examiner, Mill 

voiced his strong support for a Select Committee 

and the principle of compulsion justified in 

Austin’s Preface—arguments liberally studded 

with personal attacks on Brougham and his 

voluntaryism. Inevitably, Mill’s prediction was 

confirmed. These men were not cut from the same 

cloth as the excellent Stein and Hardenberg, 

architects of the enlightened policies that had 

transformed Prussia (p. 515). 

On April 16th, Brougham rose in the Lords 

to defend the Whig policy on schooling. Unlike 

Prussia, where “education was forced under the 

rigour [sic] of military punishment—under the 

dread of the serjeant [sic]—under the fear of the 

corporal,” he was adamant that England must not 

compel public instruction (Hansard, 1834, April 

16, p. 849). This did not mean that the leading 

societies should be left without assistance. With 

state aid and direction, he was confident that 

private initiative would be sufficient to meet the 

educational needs of the nation. The Commons 

agreed. When Roebuck presented his motion on 

June 3rd, widespread support for expanding 

instruction was tempered by religious and political 

opposition to government control of schooling. 

Rather than exploring the feasibility of a national 

system based upon the example of Prussia, the 

members would only accept an inquiry “into the 

state of the education of the people in England and 

Wales, and into the application and effect of the 

grant made last Session for the erection of school-

houses, and to consider the expediency of further 

grants in aid of education” (Hansard 1834, June 3, 

p. 139). 

The Committee met throughout the 

summer, taking testimony from leaders of the two 

school societies and prominent voices on 

education; including extensive evidence on the 

Prussian system from Pillans and Nicholas Julius 

of Berlin (editor of a Berlin journal charged with 

popularizing the Altenstein ministry’s reforms). 

The following year they reconvened to interview 

further witnesses, but evidently found little 

common ground, concluding only with the terse 

and telling comment that they were “unable to 

report their opinion to the House” (p.iii). The most 

significant feature of the published minutes was the 

remarkable seven-day evidence of James Simpson, 

author of the recently published Necessity of 

Popular Education as a National Object (1834). In 

concert with George Combe, Simpson spearheaded 

the public campaign for a state system of secular 

education in the second half of the decade. This 

was not the Godless instruction charged by its 

critics, but a non-sectarian program of practical 

Christianity that stressed both the development of 

mind and the dissemination of useful knowledge. 

Closer to the curriculum of the Prussian Burgher 

School, questions of doctrine would be left to the 

Church.   

Although Austin was not called before the 

Committee, she did attempt to inform the Inquiry 

by publishing an extended commentary on the 

passage of the Guizot Law, “the first born 

offspring” of the Prussian system (Austin, 1835, p. 

260). Again, her focus was on the dignity of human 

life and the problem of social order. She even 

quoted Kant to the effect that instruction must tame 

“the brood of vices, born of undisciplined and 



 

 

72 
 

lawless thoughts” and “enthrone wisdom as the 

ruler of Mankind” (p. 261). This was the essential 

task of public education. Schoolmasters would 

constitute a “new priesthood,” not to usurp the 

Church, but to nurture the religious feelings upon 

which all denominational teaching must depend. 

Following Guizot’s example, Austin’s argument 

then turned to practical questions of content and 

method—teacher training and textbooks. Here she 

aligned herself with “excellent” work of Simpson 

which provided a compelling explanation of the 

social conditions that beset industrial Britain.   

Drawing upon the phrenological theory 

expounded in Combe’s (1828) Constitution of Man 

(yet another offshoot of German anthropology), 

Simpson painted a terrifying picture of the laboring 

classes. Wallowing in ignorance, he judged some 

seven-eighths of the population sickly and 

impulsive creatures, unable to govern their actions 

by reason. Without a national system of education 

to elevate and inform this volatile mass, crime and 

disorder would soon reign across the land. But a 

scientific understanding of human nature was at 

hand. The anatomy of the brain revealed the 

hierarchical organization of mental organs 

generating all thought and behavior. Properly 

adapted to physiological laws of growth and 

exercise, Pestalozzian methods could strengthen 

(or weaken) the child’s faculties. Combined with a 

basic knowledge of health and economics, even the 

lowest in society could comprehend the material 

conditions and moral imperatives that governed 

their life. Moreover, their improved character 

would be passed on to future generations, ensuring 

the historical progress of civilization. Pointing to 

the ideal of a perfectly balanced brain—the 

harmonious order of powers gifted by God, 

corrupted by Mankind—the Romantic and 

religious language of spiritual development was 

appropriated within a naturalistic theory of moral 

and economic improvement.   

Simpson, Combe, and their allies had 

strong support even within the highest ranks of 

government, but the practical question of how to 

push educational reform was constrained by the 

standing interests of the Church. Forced to work 

within the existing order, the Whig Ministry looked 

for a mutually acceptable way to exert greater 

control over the provision and quality of education. 

In a famous speech to the Lords, Brougham 

acknowledged the need to improve teacher 

preparation (Hansard. 1834, April 16).  Three years 

later, amid widely voiced concerns that instruction 

was not being extended to the most needed areas, 

he proposed the establishment of a Board of 

Education empowered to operate a normal college 

and inspect schools. Intent on moving the plan 

forward, in 1839 the Ministry—avoiding the need 

for a Parliamentary vote—created an educational 

Committee within the Privy Council. Initially this 

raised little opposition, but with the publication of 

its first minute outlining the measures proposed by 

Brougham, it was greeted with loud and 

determined resistance. What was to be the faith of 

a future master? If their training was to be purely 

secular, would God’s word be left out of 

schooling? Who would monitor the work of an 

Anglican or dissenting teacher? And so on. 

Chastened by Tory opposition, the government 

capitulated, dropping its scheme for a teaching 

seminary and limiting the committees’ duties to the 

administration of government funds. Oversight of 

instruction would rest with inspectors approved by 

the respective societies—a far cry from the 

pedagogically-empowered and rationally 

structured system of state schooling envisioned by 

Austin.   

 

Charles Brooks  

If the Prussian system did not take root in 

Britain, it soon found more fertile ground in New 

England. While historians have long noted 

American interest in European education, attention 

has typically focused on native movements for 

school reform (Kaestle, 1983; Katz, 2001). David 

Komline (2020) presents a more nuanced picture of 

Transatlantic influence, tracing the 1837 formation 

of the Massachusetts Board of Education—and the 

subsequent establishment of state normal 

schools—to the agitation of the Reverend Charles 

Brooks, a Unitarian minister from Plymouth 

County. Building a pan-Protestant alliance, Brooks 



 

 

73 
 

employed Cousin’s Report to justify the religious 

rejuvenation of the state through public education. 

In the summer of 1835, on the final leg of his 

European tour Brooks attended a gathering at the 

home of Sarah Austin’s cousin, Harriet Martineau. 

Here he was introduced to Julius, who after his 

testimony before the Select Committee, was en 

route to investigate American prisons for the 

German government. The two struck up an 

immediate bond and agreed to share a cabin on the 

41-day passage across the Atlantic. As Brooks 

(1865) later recalled, this “sound scholar” and 

“pious Christian” found a ready disciple. “I fell in 

love with the Prussian system; and it seemed to 

possess me like a missionary angel” (p. 6). 

Determined to master the details of European 

schooling, he immersed himself in study, even 

initiating correspondence with Cousin (who he had 

met in Paris). Six months later, when Julius visited 

Massachusetts, Brooks was certain God had called 

upon him to “introduce it into my native state” (p. 

6). With Austin’s translation now available in 

America, he composed a Thanksgiving Address on 

the importance of education reform, which he then 

expanded into three extensive lectures on the 

nature, implementation, and benefits of Prussian 

schooling. The following year he traversed the 

state preaching the cause to religious and 

educational conventions. Collecting resolutions for 

action, by 1837 he was ready to petition the 

legislature. Submitted to the Massachusetts House 

of Representatives (1837a) on behalf of Plymouth 

Country on January 24th, Brooks laid out the 

compelling evidence of Cousin’s Report. “The 

object of education,” he asserted, “is to develope 

[sic] ALL the powers, faculties, and affections of 

human nature in their natural order, proper time 

and due proportion; so that each one may occupy 

the exact place in the grown-up character which 

God at first ordained in the infant constitution” 

(Massachusetts. House of Representatives, 1837a, 

p. 5). The Prussian system, he continued, was 

designed to unfold “the whole nature of man as the 

Creator designed; thus bringing out all the talent of 

the country, and thereby giving to every child the 

chance of making the most of himself.”  It was thus 

“emphatically a Christian system” (p. 6). Adapted 

to local needs, Massachusetts needed a committee 

in each town to oversee its schools, a 

superintending Board of Education in each 

country, and a Secretary of Public Instruction to 

disseminate information and report to the 

legislature. Most important, as the Prussian model 

proved, was the establishment of normal schools. 

A new “era of light and of love” demanded masters 

able to educate virtuous and comprehending 

citizens (p. 9). Accordingly, he concluded, “the 

first of all favors, which you can grant to your 

constituents. . . [is] to secure to every county 

‘seminaries for the preparation of teachers’” (p. 9). 

Brooks was invited to lecture the House of 

Representatives, and three months later a Bill 

drafted by James G. Carter forming a State Board 

of Education was signed into law by then Governor 

Edward Everett, with Horace Mann as its secretary. 

Normal schools were soon to follow. Brooks 

(1864) later pointed with some pride to his pivotal 

role in the process, a claim dismissed as “absurd” 

by Everett, with the observation that “my agency is 

as much ignored as possible” (cited in 

Frothingham, 1925, p. 137). The same criticism 

could be leveled at historians of American 

education who have paid little attention to one of 

most powerful and influential voices of the Early 

Republic.   

 

Edward Everett 

A prodigious scholar and gifted orator, 

Everett graduated from Harvard Divinity School in 

1813. After two years as Unitarian minister to 

Boston’s Brattle Street Church he was appointed, 

at age 19, Professor of Greek Literature at his alma 

mater. In preparation for the position, Everett was 

permitted a four-year sojourn in Europe. Two years 

were spent at the University of Göttingen (where 

he became the first American ever to be awarded a 

doctorate) and two years travelling between 

Continental capitals. In addition to being schooled 

by Germany’s leading theological and classical 

scholars Everett, together with his companion 

George Ticknor, met a veritable galaxy of Europe’s 

literati and political leaders—including Byron, 



 

 

74 
 

Alexander and Wilhelm von Humboldt, and, 

during their 1817-1818 stay in Paris, Madame de 

Stael whose 1813 book De L'Allemagne had fueled 

their interest in German learning and culture (Gura, 

2007). They were also deeply impressed by 

European institutions. During a six week break 

from studies in the fall of 1816, they toured the 

North of Germany visiting, according to Ticknor’s 

biographer, “all the principal cities, and every 

distinguished university and school, whether in a 

city or small town” (Hillard, 1876, p 107). This 

included Dresden, Berlin, Leipsic, Wittenberg, 

Halle, and Weimar—where they conversed with 

Goethe. According to Jaeck (1915) they were 

accompanied by Cousin, who is said to have 

considered Everett “the best Grecian he ever knew” 

(p. 256). No less than Ticknor, Everett was also 

deeply impressed with the superiority and 

dedication of the German teacher. His diary 

records his thoughts on improving instruction at 

home and praises the “Schoolmaster’s Institute” at 

Weimar, “an establishment for the forming young 

men to be teachers in the free schools” (cited in 

Yanikoski, 1987, p. 102). Bringing the German 

model to America became the leading idea of 

Ticknor’s friend Joseph Cosgwell (who 

matriculated at Göttingen later that year) and 

Everett’s student George Bancroft (who followed 

in 1818). Uncertain about the direction of his 

studies, Bancroft floated the idea of returning home 

to set up a German high school. Everett responded 

positively, encouraging him to observe all he 

could, adding “we can do nothing at Cambridge till 

we contrive the means of having the boys sent to 

us far better fitted than they are now” (cited in 

Jaeck, p. 263.)  

Like Everett and Ticknor, Bancroft and 

Cogswell returned to teach at Harvard, but soon 

found their careers mired by conservative politics. 

Determined to make their mark, they combined in 

1823 to open an American Gymnasium (Round 

Hill in Northampton) with the aim of employing 

the classics to develop the mind and character of 

future university students. For their part Ticknor 

and Everett sought to reform Harvard from within. 

Ticknor challenged the traditional method of 

recitation; Everett introduced the Greeks through 

the lens of Heyne and the Bible through the 

teachings of Eichhorn. For students like Emerson, 

the experience was electrifying; the ancient world 

was revealed anew as a source of meaning and 

value for the mind of a striving nation (Mathews, 

1990). Everett took the same message to Boston’s 

leading citizens in a series of popular lectures. 

More significantly, as editor of the North American 

Review between 1820 and 1824, he worked 

tirelessly to introduce European ideas in the hopes 

of igniting a new culture of higher learning that 

could inform the moral and material progress of the 

Republic. True to his nickname, “Ever-at-it,” some 

61 articles flowed from his pen: 116 by mid-

Century (Frothingham, 1925; Varg, 1992).  

Elected to Congress alongside his great 

friend Daniel Webster, Everett spent the next ten 

years in Washington, before returning to serve as 

Governor of Massachusetts between 1836 and 

1838, the momentous years of the Common School 

Crusade. His long-standing commitment to the 

importance of education, evident in the length and 

breadth of his voluminous writings, flowed 

naturally from his schooling within the Unitarian 

Church and his subsequent ascendance to its 

intellectual hub at Harvard. As Daniel Walker 

Howe (1970) explains, Cambridge theologians and 

moralists saw public instruction as a religious 

project, complementing the Church’s efforts to 

prefect the self-directed, informed, and pious 

citizenry of a Christian Republic. Building upon 

the legacy of the Pilgrim fathers and the teachings 

of Scottish Common-Sense philosophy, they 

embraced a commitment to the inherent moral and 

rational capacity of the individual. Certainly, the 

Republic needed wise and virtuous leadership, but 

this did not mean the kind of social elitism 

embraced by Europeans. The ideal of the common 

school promised equal opportunity for all 

according to merit. It was also necessary for an 

informed and conscientious citizenry willing to 

perform their social and civic duties. Both goals 

were informed by Everett’s experiences and 

Europe, and more particularly the intellectual 

commitments he had imbibed from German 



 

 

75 
 

philosophical and religious thought. The 

comparison with Mill is instructive. Both looked to 

the advancement of democracy through public 

schooling, and both recognized this would require 

the education of a cultured elite.  

Intelligence, Everett (1832) explained to 

the working men of Boston, was the wealth of a 

democratic nation. Equally distributed across the 

population, it had to be cultivated and employed for 

the material and spiritual benefit of all. Vocational 

education was important, but like his continental 

peers, he was more interested in the realization of 

the spiritual powers bestowed by the Creator. 

Mankind’s true nature depended upon the complete 

and balanced development of all the mind’s 

faculties, a process of humanization that would 

bring men and women to a more ethical and 

rational understanding of themselves and God. 

“Drawing out the divine” required a new form of 

instruction. “The mind was not a vessel to be filled 

up from without’ (p. 14). Such knowledge, he 

continued, could make someone learned, but it 

could not make them wise. The point of public 

lectures was “to kindle the understanding to 

consciousness of its own powers; to make it feel 

within itself that it is a living, spiritual thing; to 

feed it, in order that it may itself begin to act and 

operate, to compare, contrive, invent, improve and 

perfect (p. 15). Indeed, this was the larger purpose 

of all social institutions. Like a great school, all the 

instruments of intelligence—from infant to college 

education, libraires, public lectures, and even 

newsprint—had to be employed to improve the 

population. While the state could not be permitted 

to exercise control over the interplay of ideas, with 

Mill, he recognized its obligation to provide 

resources for individual improvement and promote 

the future civilization of the nation.   

Accounts of the deplorable condition of the 

state’s common school and its inadequately 

prepared teachers naturally concerned Everett and 

other likeminded leaders. As his article on 

“University Education” demonstrates, the example 

of Europe only heightened the impetus for 

fundamental reform at home. Praising Jefferson’s 

Rockfish Gap Report, he celebrated the use of 

public money—Virginia’s Literary Fund—for the 

expansion of education (Everett, 1820). Public 

schooling was an obvious good. But more 

important, as Jefferson would also argue, was the 

improvement of higher education (Tomlinson, 

2005). Everett’s overriding concern was the 

establishment of a national University based upon 

the German model. Building upon a rigorous 

gymnasium education, he envisioned an advanced 

professional school that promoted the generation of 

knowledge through free interchange between the 

disciplines (a counterpart of the elective system 

subsequently adopted at the University of 

Virginia). This could not be left to the states, or to 

private beneficence. In contrast to the many 

prestigious colleges supported by the modest, 

worn-torn monarchies and principalities of 

Germany, America had “never founded a literary 

institution of any description or sort;” a free 

republic, “which ought to see every thing as sacred 

which belongs to the enlightening, instructing, and 

elevating the nation,” stands in shame, allowing an 

array of petty aristocrats to be “the guardians of the 

highest good, the cultivation of the intellectual 

man” (p. 137).   

 

The Massachusetts Board of Education 

As it turned out, with his election as 

governor in 1836 Everett inherited the opportunity 

to use public funds for the advancement of 

schooling in Massachusetts. The question of 

educational reform had occupied the state 

legislature for more than a decade. Led by James 

G. Carter, critics complained that inadequate 

resources and unprepared teachers had corrupted 

the historical mission of the common school, most 

notably, in its duty to ensure the piety and morals 

of the population. In 1827 Carter submitted a 

memorial to the Senate requesting funds to 

establish a teaching seminary. When his petition 

was narrowly rejected, he joined with other 

prominent schoolmen in 1830 to press the cause 

through the formation of the American Institute of 

Instruction (Kaestle, 1983). The opportunity for 

progress came in 1834 when Massachusetts 

received a sizable reimbursement from the federal 



 

 

76 
 

government for the sale of land in Maine and its 

services in the War of 1812. A law was enacted 

allocating the money to the support common 

schools, but crucially provided no formula for its 

disbursement. Weighing the merits of civil and 

religious liberty with the importance of education 

to propensity and social order, then Governor John 

Davis suggested that the legislature approve 

employing the fund to aid local and voluntary 

efforts (Massachusetts. House of Representatives, 

1835a). Chaired by Everett’s older brother 

Alexander, the House Committee on Education 

accepted the Brougham-like logic. Half the sum 

would be allocated based upon population; the 

other half used to stimulate local initiate. More 

importantly, the money was not to be wasted on 

inadequate buildings, books, or instruction. The 

quality of education had to be improved. Here the 

Committee turned to the example of Prussia, whose 

methods of training teachers now engaged “the 

attention of the friends of education throughout the 

Christian world” (Massachusetts. House of 

Representatives, 1835b, p. 8). Applying some 

portion of the fund for establishment of similar 

schools, the Committee concluded, “would do 

more for the cause of public instruction in this 

Commonwealth, than almost any innovation on the 

existing institutions that could well be imagined (p. 

8). To support their case, the Committee appended 

an “Outline of the Prussian System” provided by 

Julius as a short but faithful summary of Cousin’s 

valuable work. They also recommended 

distributing copies of Austin’s translation to every 

town in the state—which Alexander Everett (1835) 

then reviewed in the April 1835 issue of the North 

American Review for the broader benefit of the 

nation.   

Evidently concerned that the fund might be 

distributed without due attention to the quality of 

instruction, the American Institute of Instruction 

submitted a memorial the following year calling 

for the appointment of a state superintendent of 

schools (Massachusetts. House of Representatives, 

1836a). In contrast to Prussia and France, they 

pointed to the lack of system, the necessity of 

teacher training, the value of accurate records, and 

importance of inspection. The institute’s annual 

conventions had done much to encourage mutual 

support and edification, but far greater direction 

and encouragement was needed for effective 

reform. The Education Committee was in complete 

agreement. Authored by its new chair, James G. 

Cater, their 1836 report recommended immediate 

enactment by the legislature. However, the 

committee was divided on the question of teacher 

seminaries pushed by Carter. The example of 

Prussia weighed heavily, he explained, but the 

majority held that the current proposal must be in 

place before any attempt was made to establish 

normal schools (Massachusetts House of 

Representatives, 1836b). When the House failed to 

move on the Committee’s modest 

recommendation, Everett used his January 1837 

Address introduce a more robust proposal 

(Massachusetts. Senate, 1837). Insistent that the 

“wealth of Massachusetts always has been, and 

always will be, the mind of her children,” he noted 

the urgent need to improve facilities, equipment, 

and instruction; utility alone suggested “the 

creation of a board of commissioners of schools, to 

serve without salary, with authority to appoint a 

secretary, on a reasonable compensation, to be paid 

from the school fund” (pp. 16-17).   

Determined not to let the cause of teaching 

seminaries languish, supporters called upon 

Brooks to address the House. Articles appeared in 

the press and the American Institute of Instruction 

weighed in with a second memorial 

(Massachusetts. House of Representatives, 1837b). 

Carter’s first tactic was to secure a portion of 

further federal funds flowing from the sale of 

Western lands. When this failed—contrary to the 

two-step process agreed previously—he drafted a 

Bill combining his proposal with Everett’s plan, 

only to have it stripped away in the House debate. 

The amended motion proved successful, and by 

April the Board of Education had been signed into 

law, but without any commitment to the 

establishment of normal schools. Komline (2020) 

provides a reconstruction of these events, detailing 

how Brooks’ agitation was complemented by the 

political maneuvering of the state’s powerbrokers. 



 

 

77 
 

In his efforts to secure passage of the Bill, Everett 

enlisted the help of Edmund Dwight, a wealthy 

businessman with powerful connections. His 

support and influence provided the “crucial 

momentum” (p. 143). But it came at a cost; a seat 

on the Board of Education and, what appears to be 

the added condition, that Horace Mann, not James 

Carter, be appointed Secretary.   

Everett, who chaired the Board and wrote 

its first two reports, soon discovered that Mann was 

an inspired choice (Massachusetts. Senate, 1838). 

His duties, loosely defined, were to report on “the 

condition and efficiency of the common schools” 

and communicate information across the 

Commonwealth “on the most approved and 

successful methods of arranging the studies and 

conducting the education of the young’ (p. 6). To 

this end it was decided that he should arrange 

annual conventions and offer lectures in each of the 

state’s 13 counties. After six months Everett 

reported “the happiest effects.” Mann’s zeal “had 

awakened a new interest in the cause of school 

education” (p. 7). Comparing reports, it is striking 

how closely they cooperated on the core problems 

of facilities, record keeping, administration, 

textbooks, teaching, and the encouragement of 

public support for schooling. For both men, the 

elevation of mind and morals was key to the 

progress of Christian civilization, the project of the 

American Republic. Curiously, while detailing the 

poor preparation of teachers, Mann’s first report 

did not mention normal schools (Massachusetts 

Senate, 1838). That was Everett’s special project, 

evidently taking shape behind the scenes. After 

detailing the example of foreign nations, he 

cryptically expressed his “sanguine hope that the 

time is not too far distant, when the resources of 

public or private liberality will be applied in 

Massachusetts for the foundation of an institution 

for the formation of teachers” (Massachusetts. 

Senate, 1838, p. 12). Again, Dwight had come to 

the rescue, this time with a $10,000 donation, 

matched by the Legislature the following April. 

Mann’s (1845) second lecture thus expanded on 

the preparation of teachers in time for the opening 

of the nation’s first normal school in Lexington, the 

following year. Here a new influence became 

apparent: phrenology. Where Everett’s (1859) 

speech to teachers at Tisbury in 1838, “Education 

the Nurture of the Mind,” employed highly 

metaphorical allusions to the “spiritual essence,” 

“heavenly flame,” and “vital spark” in the 

cultivation of powers and talents, Mann looked to 

physiological laws of cause and effect. 

 

George Combe’s Physiology of the Mind   

Mann’s journal reveals the pivotal role 

Combe’s (1828) Constitution of Man played in his 

decision to accept the Secretaryship. Trading his 

lawbooks for “the improvability of the race,” he 

dedicated himself the larger sphere of mind and 

morals. “Having found the present generation 

composed of materials almost unmallable, I am 

about transferring my efforts to the next. Men are 

cast-iron; but children are wax” (Mann, 1865, p. 

83). Simpson’s (1834) Necessity of Popular 

Education illustrated its application to schooling. 

In what reads like a precis of Combe’s moral 

philosophy, Mann laid out the import of 

phrenology for the training of teachers. Like any 

other art, education required a knowledge of 

materials and the means of transformation. The 

former was revealed in the architecture of the brain. 

A hierarchy of discrete emotional, moral, and 

intellectual organs governed every aspect of human 

behavior. The latter utilized laws of heredity and 

exercise. While individuals varied between and 

within nations according to the influence of social 

institutions, their innate powers could be 

strengthened or weakened through appropriate 

activities. In addition to imparting the most useful 

knowledge of life, the overarching goal was the 

perfection of human nature through the full and 

harmonious balance of the faculties gifted by God. 

In his Notes on the United States of America during 

a Phrenological Visit in 1838-9-40.) Combe 

(1841a)—who had travelled with Mann and 

Everett to the Taunton Convention—reported “I 

never listened to a more sound, philosophical, 

comprehensive, practical, eloquent, and felicitous 

composition” (p. I. 65). In fact, he had found his 

most ardent disciple.  



 

 

78 
 

Combe’s influence on Mann is apparent in 

all his later writings, most especially his famous 

Seventh Annual Report (Massachusetts. Senate, 

1844). On his return to Europe Combe took up 

residence in Germany in the hopes of popularizing 

phrenology in the land of its origin. Mann wrote 

asking for “a series of letters in relation to the 

German schools,—their course of studies, modes 

of instruction, disciplines, order, qualifications of 

teachers, attainments of scholars, results, &c.” in 

order to improve the training of teachers in the 

Massachusetts normal schools (Mann,1865, p. 

159). Combe wrote back suggesting he come see 

for himself. By 1843 the tour was set. But Combe, 

suffering from an acute case of hemorrhoids, was 

unable to travel (Stack, 2008). Limited to making 

introductions and arranging visits, Mann drew 

upon his “large & comprehensive views” to 

complete his “impulsive Report” (cited in 

Tomlinson, 2005, p. 267). Framed in terms of 

national character, Mann compared the brutalized 

populations of industrial England with the more 

elevated character of despotic Prussia. Public 

schooling was creating a new breed of men and 

women. The same practices would also work in 

democratic America, after all “the human faculties 

are substantially the same all over the world, and 

hence the best means for their development and 

growth in one place, must be substantially the best 

for their development and growth elsewhere” 

(Mann, 1865, p. 242). Those in favor of the 

scientific approach to education, he told readers of 

the Common School Journal, were "helping to 

elevate mankind into the upper and purer regions 

of civilization, Christianity, and the worship of the 

true God;” those who obstruct “the progress of this 

cause are impelling the race backward into 

barbarism and idolatry" (Mann, M. & Pécant, F 

(1891), V. p. 163).  

What gets lost in this Transatlantic tale is 

the reciprocal role Massachusetts played in the 

movement for public education in Britain. 

Determined to reinvigorate the 1930s campaign for 

secular schooling, Combe (1841b) published 

“Education in America,” a Cousin-like description 

of the legal, administrative, and practical workings 

of the Massachusetts system. In contrast to the 

centralized and authoritarian institutions of 

despotic Prussia he hailed the local and democratic 

traditions of the United States. As evidenced by 

public records and copious reports, in its first four 

years under Mann’s stewardship, the Board had 

worked effectively to improve instruction across 

the state. Most important for British readers—

given the disputes of the previous decade—this had 

been achieved without legal compulsion or 

religious rancor. The Secretary’s power was 

limited to the force of argument; clergy of all 

denominations embraced its nonsectarian focus on 

practical Christianity. Here was “strong evidence 

of the possibility of operating on the public mind 

by means of an organized system, and authorized 

functionaries, wielding moral powers alone,” a 

lesson highly “instructive to ourselves” (pp, 495-

496). After his return from Germany in 1844, 

Combe (1847a, 1847b, 1848) was ready to take this 

message to the country. With the government 

struggling to institute reforms under the yoke of the 

Church, he published a series of influential papers 

on science, religion, and schooling—and rallied 

Richard Cobden and other veterans of the Anti-

Corn league to the cause of national education. As 

Maltby (1918) explains, it was Combe’s 

Massachusetts blueprint that provided the core 

principles of this Manchester based campaign to 

establish public schooling, first in Lancashire, and 

then the nation; the movement which ultimately 

led, under the leadership of William Edward 

Forster, to the English Elementary Education Act 

of 1870. 

  



 

 

79 
 

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Manuscript received, March 8, 2022 

Revision received, August 28, 2022 

Manuscript accepted, August 29, 2022