Head Masters: Phrenology, Secular Education, and Nineteenth-Century Social Thought

Contributes to a better understanding of Horace Mann and the educational reform movement he advanced

Head Masters challenges the assumption that phrenology—the study of the conformation of the skull as it relates to mental faculties and character—played only a minor and somewhat anecdotal role in the development of education. Stephen Tomlinson asserts instead that phrenology was a scientifically respectable theory of human nature, perhaps the first solid physiological psychology. He shows...