"This series presents the sources of the American educational heritage. There could be no more appropriate beginning than a volume of selections from Horace Mann's reports ( 1834– 1848) to the Massachusetts Board of Education. As the commanding figure of the early public school movement, Mann more than anyone articulated the nineteenth-century American faith in education. His work still stands as the classic statement of the relationship between freedom, popular education, and republican government."

—From the Foreword by Lawrence A. Cremin