Common School

The common school was the tax-funded, nonsectarian public school of the nineteenth-century United States, originating in New England as a community-funded institution of education for all children of a region or neighborhood. The movement is dated from 1837, when Massachusetts appointed Horace Mann the first secretary of its State Board of Education; he led the reform through 1848 as a lawyer, state senator and board secretary, campaigning against fees and religious sectarianism in the classroom even as his own proposals on Bible use drew resistance from religious groups. Common schools typically taught the three Rs, reading, writing and arithmetic, alongside history, geography and moral instruction, and the movement is the direct ancestor of universal public literacy in the United States.