Colour-enhanced portrait of Horace Mann (1796-1859), American education reformer. In 1848, after serving as Secretary of the Massachusetts State Board of Education since its creation, he was elected to the US House of Representatives. Arguing that universal public education was the best way to turn the nation's unruly children into disciplined, judicious republican citizens, Mann won widespread approval from modernizers, especially in his Whig Party, for building public schools. Most states adopted one version or another of the system he established in Massachusetts, especially the program for normal schools to train professional teachers. Mann has been credited by educational historians as the Father of the Common School Movement. He was popular with students and with lay audiences across the Midwest who attended his lectures promoting public schools. He also employed the first woman faculty member to be paid on an equal basis with her male