One of their goals in the movement for education reform was to better educate children. Families were very poor because they couldn’t pay for education and so they had to revert to mindless work which would create an endless circle of poverty.

Another one of the goals was that the education board wanted to get kids off the streets because the kids were stealing, destroying property, and setting fires. They figured that with the public education they could keep the kids off the streets by occupying them with school and having them then get a well paying job.

 Horace Mann  Thomas Jefferson  John

The first key person in this movement is Horace Mann. Horace was the main body of this movement. As supervisor of education in Massachusetts he made it possible for Massachusetts to be the first state with public schools that had good funding. He also started to get the ball rolling on good public schools in other states. He also became the first president of a college for men and women.

Thomas Jefferson popularized the idea that a democratic republic required an educated citizen. He helped to reform the education in the early 19 th century. Those are ideas that helped make the struggle easier to get education for all.

Horace Mann tried to get people to pay taxes, to get better schools to pay the teachers higher salaries. He wanted to establish better training for the teachers. He needed money from the tax payers to really make public schools smart and strong. He would need a lot of help to make these schools what he wanted them to be.

In 1825 there was the starting of a social fraternity named Kappa Alpha. Then in the 1830’s Phi Beta Kappa became a scholastic honor society. Which rewarded students for doing their best and staying in school. This was a pretty big deal back then because it really gave kids the incentive to stay in school.

Horace Mann got other states to join into his public school movement. He had really wanted this to spread. It was a very good movement for a lot of the un- represented people in poverty. A lot of people started to get involved and the movement really began to take off

A huge accomplishment for the education industry that really showed that they were making progress was that America was becoming more urban. There weren’t as many people that were un- educated and in poverty. America wasn’t just farm country anymore now it was really beginning in the manufacturing and other businesses.

A. History Alive Textbook 2005 B. None C. The Gilder Lehrman institute of American History D. Http//: E. The Schools by: Leonard Everett Fisher 1983