Second Annual Report of the Board of Education

Mann endorsed Gallaudet’s primer in his Second Annual Report (1838). His endorsement, Gallaudet’s general fame and public adulation, erroneous reports circulating at the time that mighty Prussia was using a whole-word system, and possibly the prospect of fame and a little profit, caused Mann’s own wife, Mary Tyler Peabody—whose family names were linked to a network of powerful families up and down the Eastern seaboard—to write a whole-word primer. The Mann family was only one of a host of influential voices being raised against the traditional reading instructions in the most literate nation on earth. In Woodbridge’s Annals of Education, a steady taboo was directed against spelling and the alphabet method.