ABSTRACT
Horace Mann was on to something. When he witnessed an angry street riot in New England, his conviction that “the educated, the wealthy, the intelligent” had gone morally astray by abandoning the public was fortified (Johnson, 2002, p. 79). Mann chided the economic elite for shirking obligations to their fellow man by favoring private education over common schools. He conceptualized public education as “the great equalizer,” or the most powerful mechanism for abating class-based “prejudice and hatred,” and, most important, the only means by which those without economic privilege or generational wealth could experience any hope of equal footing.
