For this reason, too, the Transcendentalists embraced educational reform as embodied in the efforts of Bronson Alcott and Elizabeth Palmer Peabody, who strove to develop the individual by encouraging intuitive understanding, but could not wholeheartedly take up the cause of common school reform as promoted by Horace Mann. A legislator and the secretary of the first Massachusetts Board of Education (formed in 1837), Mann addressed issues of curriculum, administration, teacher training, and pay. He also promoted a public educational system free of specific religious and political instruction, and the discontinuation of corporal punishment.
But Mann's vision of a system built upon an administrative structure did not satisfy the Transcendentalists' sense of education as a process built upon the individual. Moreover, the exclusion of religion from moral teaching seemed to some to diminish the importance of spirituality. Significantly, when Bronson Alcott offered to lecture at a normal school (that is, a teachers' training school), Mann turned him down. The Transcendentalists' belief that "the individual is the world" (as declared by Emerson in his "Historic Notes of Life and Letters in New England") did not mesh well with more pragmatic efforts at reform from within the system.
