Description

On the night of June 9, 1834, a group of prominent men "chiefly engaged in commerce" gathered
privately in a Boston drawing room to discuss a scheme of universal schooling. Secretary of this
meeting was William Ellery Channing, Horace Mann's own minister as well as an international
figure and the leading Unitarian of his day. The location of the meeting house is not entered in the
minutes nor are the names of the assembly's participants apart from Channing. Even though the
literacy rate in Massachusetts was 98 percent, and in neighboring Connecticut, 99.8 percent, the
assembled businessmen agreed the present system of schooling allowed too much to depend upon
chance. It encouraged more entrepreneurial exuberance than the social system could bear.
– The minutes of this meeting are Appleton Papers collection, Massachusetts Historical Society
Frederick W. Taylor
The first man on record to perceive how much additional production could be extracted from close regulation of
labor was Frederick Winslow Taylor, son of a wealthy Philadelphia lawyer. "What I demand of the worker,"
Taylor said, "is not to produce any longer by his own initiative, but to execute punctiliously the orders given down
to their minutest details."