The Cambridge History of English and American Literature in 18 Volumes (1907–21). rn VOLUME XVII. Later National Literature, Part II.
XXIII. Education§ 37. Henry Barnard
One other of these observers of European experiment has already been mentioned,—Henry Barnard (1811–1900),—the record of whose observations exceeds in bulk the work of all the others. In 1852 Barnard issued a volume of School Architecture placing that phase of educational activity on the most advanced plane, where it has since been maintained. In 1851 he published an extensive volume on Normal Schools, and in 1854 one on National Education. These activities were continued in the serial publication of the American Journal of Education.
Horace Mann’s activities were directed pointedly against local evils and produced violent reaction. The controversy in magazine and newspaper was prolonged and became of national interest. So it happened that the great educational reforms of the fourth, fifth, and sixth decades of the century, in which Barnard and many others laboured no less effectively than Mann, became generally connected with Mann’s name
In this period official educational reports appeared in great quantities. Such documents actually began as early as 1789 with the Reports of the Regents of the State of New York to the legislature. This series, still continued, gives us the longest survey of education to be found in state or nation. Reports of state superintendents of education began with theestablishment of such an office in the State of New York in 1812. These two series were the only ones, however, before the appointment of Mann in Massachusetts in 1837 and of Barnard in Connecticut in 1838. The reports of Horace Mann are to this day outstanding documents and reveal in detail the accomplishments as well as the needs of education in his time. Others of importance were those of Lewis of Ohio, Pierce of Michigan, and Gilman of Connecticut, later the first president of Johns Hopkins University. While none of these documentary reports possess the literary quality of those of Mann and Barnard, and perhaps gain their classification as literature merely because they appear in print and cumber the shelves of our libraries, yet in them one can discover the educational achievements and aspirations of the period.