Common School Movement

The Common School Movement was the nineteenth-century effort in the United States to build publicly supported schools open to the children of a whole community. Common schools began in New England as community-funded schools, often under the oversight of local clergy, and the reform drive gathered force from 1837, when Massachusetts made Horace Mann the first secretary of its State Board of Education. Mann and fellow reformers such as Henry Barnard pressed for common standards, better teacher preparation, including the first normal school at Lexington in 1839, and a curriculum built on reading, writing, arithmetic, history and geography with strong moral instruction. Disputes over religion in the classroom, especially from Roman Catholic immigrants, were a lasting controversy.