Horace Mann School - History

History

The school was founded in 1887 by Nicholas Murray Butler as a co-educational experimental and developmental unit of Teachers College at Columbia University. Its first location was a building at 9 University Place in Manhattan's Greenwich Village. The school moved in 1901 to 120th Street in Morningside Heights. Columbia University followed suit soon afterwards, moving northwards to its present campus. The name of the school can still be seen on the northern-most building at the Columbia campus, named Horace Mann Hall, after education reformer Horace Mann. However, Horace Mann was becoming a school in its own right instead of a teaching laboratory, and it became more independent of the Columbia University and Teachers College. The Teachers College therefore created the Lincoln School, located on 110th Street, across the street from Central Park, to continue its experiments in teaching.

The school split into separate all-male and all-female schools and in 1914, the Boys' School moved to 246th Street in the Riverdale section of the Bronx, and during the 1940s it severed formal ties with Columbia University and became Horace Mann School. The Horace Mann School for Girls remained at Teachers College, and then merged with the Lincoln School in 1940, and finally closed in 1946.

The New York School for Nursery Years (founded in 1954 on 90th Street in Manhattan) became the Horace Mann School for Nursery Years in 1968, and was co-ed. In 1972, Horace Mann merged with the Barnard School, next door in Riverdale, to form the Horace Mann-Barnard Lower School for kindergarten through grade six, located on the former Barnard School campus. At that point, only the lower school was mixed. In 1975, the Horace Mann School returned to its roots as a co-educational learning environment and began admitting girls to the Upper School. The Class of 1976 is Horace Mann School's last all-male class. In 1999, the sixth grade moved from the Horace Mann-Barnard campus to the main 246th Street campus and formed a distinct Middle Division along with the seventh and eighth grades.