American educator Henry Barnard (1811-1900) was influential in improving public schools and in promoting an educational literature in the United States.

Henry Barnard was born in Hartford, Conn., on Jan. 24, 1811. He graduated from Yale in 1830, taught briefly in Pennsylvania, and returned to Yale to study law. He was admitted to the bar in 1833-1834. Barnard's tours of the South and West and, in 1835, of Europe nourished growing interests in education and in politics that were finally combined when he was elected to the Connecticut Legislature in 1837. He secured passage of a bill creating a board of commissioners to supervise the state's faltering common schools, was appointed to the board, and in 1838 became its executive secretary.

Barnard, who found the schools poorly maintained and attended, wanted public education "good enough for the best and cheap enough for the poorest." He believed that thorough moral training in the common schools...