Page:The Cambridge History of American Literature, v3.djvu/426

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4o8 Education institution. Others were official, as that made by Professor Calvin E. Stowe on the Prussian school system to the Ohio legislature in 1837. This brief volume, admirable in concise- ness, temper, and insight, had wide influence and was repub- lished by many state legislatures. So also was the report of the French philosopher Cousin, On the State of Public Instruction in Germany, Particularly in Prussia (1831). This, indeed, because of its wide influence came to be considered a part of American educational literature. More ponderous and less influential was the exhaustive re- port of Alexander Dallas Bache (1839), the first president of Girard College. Authorized by the trustees to gather informa- tion concerning the education of orphans, he included an elab- orate study of school systems of most European countries. The influence of all these reports was focussed by Horace Mann in his Seventh Annual Report (1844) as Secretary of the Massa- chusetts Board of Education. Mann was an ardent patriot, an experienced politician and public administrator, a keen observer, an energetic reformer, and the wielder of a trenchant pen. His forceful statement was followed up by yet more forceful practical endeavour. The abo- lition of corporal punishment, the introduction of an enriched curriculum, the training of teachers, the adoption of methods based on a scientific knowledge of the human mind, the proper classification of school children, the elaboration of the public school system to include many if not all of the quasi-public organizations so numerous in America — these were his de- mands. The effect of all of the efforts to borrow lessons from European, particularly German, experience was thoroughly in evidence. One other of these observers of European experiment has already been mentioned, — Henry Barnard (1811-1900), — the record of whose observations exceeds in bulk the work of all the others. In 1852 Barnard issued a volimie of School Archi- tecture placing that phase of educational activity on the most advanced plane, where it has since been maintained. In 1851 he published an extensive volume on Normal Schools, and in 1854 one on National Education. These activities were continued in the serial publication of the American Journal oj Education.