Richard visits Horace Mann on the first floor of Wham with Brenda.

Round Trip Miles: 58

Total Miles to Date: 6,163.8

Latitude: 37.711747

Longitude: -89.217872 

On March 17, 2015 Richard traveled 29 miles to Brenda’s home in West Frankfort. He was supposed to head to Nashville, TN on March 19 with Brenda but unfortunately, he forgot and he stayed at home. When Brenda came back from her trip to Tennessee, she traveled another 29 miles and showed Richard around Carbondale. He was extremely fascinated by the fact that there was so much history in a place so close to home. His favorite historically related statue was in the first floor of Wham, right below his home! 

                                             

The statue was of Horace Mann.  SIU has displayed his face on campus because of all of the positive changes he has made to the education system. Here is what PBS.org has to say about him:

Horace Mann (1796-1859)

Horace Mann, often called the Father of the Common School, began his career as a lawyer and legislator. When he was elected to act as Secretary of the newly-created Massachusetts Board of Education in 1837, he used his position to enact major educational reform. He spearheaded the Common School Movement, ensuring that every child could receive a basic education funded by local taxes. His influence soon spread beyond Massachusetts as more states took up the idea of universal schooling.

Mann's commitment to the Common School sprang from his belief that political stability and social harmony depended on education: a basic level of literacy and the inculcation of common public ideals. He declared, "Without undervaluing any other human agency, it may be safely affirmed that the Common School...may become the most effective and benignant of all forces of civilization." Mann believed that public schooling was central to good citizenship, democratic participation and societal well being. He observed, "A republican form of government, without intelligence in the people, must be, on a vast scale, what a mad-house, without superintendent or keepers, would be on a small one." The democratic and republican principals that propelled Mann's vision of the Common School has colored our assumptions about public schooling ever since.

Mann was influential in the development of teacher training schools and the earliest attempts to professionalize teaching. He was not the first to propose state-sponsored teacher training institutes (James Carter had recommended them in the 1820s), but, in 1838, he was crucial to the actual establishment of the first Normal Schools in Massachusetts. Mann knew that the quality of rural schools had to be raised, and that teaching was the key to that improvement. He also recognized that the corps of teachers for the new Common Schools were most likely to be women, and he argued forcefully (if, by contemporary standards, sometimes insultingly) for the recruitment of women into the ranks of teachers, often through the Normal Schools. These developments were all part of Mann's driving determination to create a system of effective, secular, universal education in the United