Three Ways Americans Learned on Their Own Terms: Horace Mann, the Chautauqua Movement, and W.E.B. Du Bois

When most Americans think about the history of public education, they think about Horace Mann. And they’re right to. Mann’s influence on the American school system was enormous. But for more than a century, his version of education has dominated the story, and a lot of other important chapters have been left out.

This article is about two of those chapters. Alongside Mann’s public school system, two very different educational traditions were developing in 19th-century America, both of them profoundly self-directed in their approach. The Chautauqua Movement brought adult learning circles to hundreds of thousands of ordinary Americans. And W.E.B. Du Bois, writing from within and against a tradition of Black self-education that stretched back through slavery, articulated a vision of education as self-determination that has rarely been given the prominence it deserves in mainstream education history.

Let’s start with Mann. Horace Mann became Massachusetts’s first Secretary of Education in 1837, and he used the position to campaign vigorously for a system of publicly funded, professionally taught, universally accessible common schools. He traveled to Prussia (one of the most educationally advanced states in Europe at the time) and returned convinced that the Prussian model of age-graded classrooms, trained teachers, and standardized curriculum was the model America should adopt.

Mann’s vision was genuinely democratic in its aspiration. He believed that universal public education was the great equalizer: that a common school system, accessible to all children regardless of class or wealth, was the foundation of a democratic society. “Education,” he wrote, “is the great equalizer of the conditions of men.” This is a vision that still resonates.

But the model Mann imported from Prussia wasn’t designed for democracy. It was designed for a state that needed trained, compliant civil servants. The age-graded classroom, the professional teacher as the unquestioned authority, the standardized curriculum decided by officials above the learner: this is a model that prizes uniformity over individuality, compliance over curiosity, and the transmission of approved content over the cultivation of the learner’s own drive to understand.

Mann’s intentions were admirable. The system he helped create has been a source of genuine opportunity for millions of American children. But the model he championed also established defaults that are still with us: the teacher as the authority, the curriculum as the given, and the student as the recipient rather than the agent of learning. Understanding that those defaults were choices (historical choices, made for historical reasons, not inevitable facts about how education must work) is one of the most liberating things the history of SDL can offer.

While Mann was building the public school system, a very different educational tradition was developing in the American Midwest. In 1874, a Methodist minister named John Heyl Vincent and a businessman named Lewis Miller organized the first Chautauqua Assembly on the shores of Chautauqua Lake in western New York. What began as a summer program for Sunday school teachers quickly grew into one of the most remarkable adult learning movements in American history.

By the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the Chautauqua Institution and the traveling Chautauqua movement it inspired were reaching tens of thousands of Americans every year (farmers, shopkeepers, homemakers, workers of every kind) with lectures, discussions, music, drama, and self-improvement programs. Theodore Roosevelt called it “the most American thing in America.”

What made Chautauqua significant for the history of SDL is its organizational form. It wasn’t a school. It had no required curriculum, no grades, no credentials, and no gatekeeping around who could participate. Adults chose what they wanted to learn, engaged with ideas on their own terms, and formed learning communities around shared curiosity. This is self-directed, community-based adult learning at a genuinely large scale, and it was wildly popular.

Chautauqua reflects a deep tradition in American culture of what some historians call the “self-made” person: the autodidact who pursues knowledge outside of formal institutions. Benjamin Franklin’s self-education through voracious reading and the discussion groups he called the Junto is an early example. Frederick Douglass’s heroic self-instruction in literacy while enslaved is another. The tradition of the self-educated American runs through the culture in ways that the mainstream history of education rarely honors.

No figure in this tradition is more important, or more underacknowledged, than W.E.B. Du Bois. Du Bois was born in 1868, three years after the end of the Civil War, in Great Barrington, Massachusetts. He went on to become the first African American to earn a doctorate from Harvard, a foundational sociologist, a tireless civil rights activist, and one of the most penetrating education thinkers the United States has ever produced.

For Du Bois, education was inseparable from freedom. In The Souls of Black Folk (1903) and throughout his career, he argued that education wasn’t primarily about economic utility or workforce preparation. It was about the full development of the human person. He wanted Black Americans to have access to the full range of human knowledge — philosophy, history, literature, science — not just the portions deemed economically useful by a white power structure.

Du Bois and Booker T. Washington had a famous disagreement about this. Washington argued for vocational training: teach Black Americans practical skills that the economy needs and let economic progress lead to social progress. Du Bois thought this was a profound mistake, a surrender of the intellectual and political formation that education at its best provides. He wanted something bigger than economic survival. He wanted human flourishing: the same thing Aristotle had called eudaimonia, now claimed not just for Athenian citizens but for all people.

This debate between Washington and Du Bois is more than a historical curiosity. It echoes arguments that continue in education policy today about what education is for: whether its primary purpose is economic productivity or human development, and who gets to access which version. It’s a debate worth revisiting with fresh eyes, because both sides have something to teach us.

Taken together, Mann, Chautauqua, and Du Bois give us a picture of 19th-century American education as a genuinely contested space. Not a smooth progression toward a single model, but a conflict between competing visions: the standardized, institution-centered school on one hand, and the self-directed, community-based, learner-centered tradition on the other. The first won out institutionally. The second never disappeared.

In the next article, we’ll look at the “giants” of the 20^th century education reformation movement: Maria Montessori and John Dewey.

This work draws from my book, Theoretical and Historical Evolutions of Self-Directed Learning, if you geek out about this stuff and want a deeper dive.