The urge to organize and coordinate intellectual and educational activities on a grand scale has seldom been more dynamic than under the changing governments in France from the National Revolution in 1789 to the mounting powers of a Napoleonic Empire a few years later. The dynamism came largely from a group of intellectuals who styled themselves Ideologues. They held uppermost the causes of education, scholarship, and philosophy; and they hailed the possible support of successive governments in the decades immediately before and after 1800. As one political administration grew disappointing, they wished for its downfall and lauded the next. With each new government they anticipated a further break with the past and a revived hope for wider acceptance of their views. In developing these they valued highly the influence of Voltaire, Montesquieu, Helvétius, and the Encyclopedists of the French Enlightenment.

One might say that Horace Mann's influence began to be felt in South America when he wrote his famous Seventh Annual Report concerning his trip to Europe to inspect schools, though the actual reading of it by the man whom it most impressed did not occur until four years later, in 1847. This man, Domingo Faustino Sarmiento, later famous as the “schoolmaster president” of Argentina, spread far and wide the doctrines Mann preached in Massachusetts, and at least three Latin-American nations are the richer because these two leaders of disparate background and destiny met briefly and exchanged ideas.

Very few pieces of educational writing have been subject to so much confused criticism as the brief tract which, with its laconic title, Of Education, was launched anonymously upon the public on June 5, 1644.