Page:The Cambridge History of American Literature, v3.djvu/427

OfEcial Reports 409 Horace Mann's activities were directed pointedly against local evils and produced violent reaction. The controversy in magazine and newspaper was prolonged and became of national interest. So it happened that the great educational reforms of the fourth, fifth, and sixth decades of the century, in which Barnard and many others laboured no less effectively than Mann, became generally connected with Mann's name In this period official educational reports appeared in great quantities. Such documents actually began as early as 1789 with the Reports of the Regents of the State of New York to the legislature. This series, still continued, gives us the longest survey of education to be found in state or nation. Reports of state superintendents of education began with the establishment of such an office in the State of New York in 1 8 1 2 . These two series were the only ones, however, before the ap- pointment of Mann in Massachusetts in 1837 and of Barnard in Connecticut in 1838. The reports of Horace Mann are to this day outstanding documents and reveal in detail the accom- plishments as well as the needs of education in his time. Others of importance were those of Lewis of Ohio, Pierce of Michigan, and Oilman of Connecticut, later the first president of Johns Hopkins University. While none of these documentary reports possess the literary quality of those of Mann and Barnard, and perhaps gain their classification as literature merely because they appear in print and cumber the shelves of our libraries, yet in them one can discover the educational achievements and aspirations of the period. Technical professional literature began to appear towards the middle of the century, with the founding of the normal schools. Omitting the short production of Neef, the earliest and undoubtedly the most popular and influential through all of this period was The Theory and Practice of Teaching (1847) by David T. Page, principal of the first New York normal school. Popular educational discussion was largely if not wholly directed to the question of free public schools as opposed to the traditional private, church, or quasi-public schools supported by tuition fees or rates. It is difficult for Americans of the pres- ent generation to realize that little more than half a century ago free public schools were frequently attacked as having