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
