Head Masters: Phrenology, Secular Education, and Nineteenth-Century Social Thought » (1)

Stephen Tomlinson is Associate Professor in the Social Foundations of Education at The University of Alabama.

Contributes to a better understanding of Horace Mann and the educational reform movement he advanced. "Stephen Tomlinson's fascinating and very well written study focuses on the evolution of phrenological ideas among leading thinkers and reformers in Europe and the United States and explores the impact of these ideas on a number of specific reforms, including public schooling and the care of the disabled. The author's overarching argument is that while phrenology promised social progress--and helped propel a number of influential reforms--the doctrine also led in certain unhappy directions, such as racist theory and eugenics."--Steven Mintz, author of Moralists and Modernizers: America's Pre-Civil War Reformers