Horace Mann
Horace Mann
Horace Mannwas an American politician and educational reformer. A Whig devoted to promoting speedy modernization, he served in the Massachusetts State legislature. In 1848, after serving as Secretary of the Massachusetts State Board of Education since its creation, he was elected to the United States House of Representatives. Historian Ellwood P. Cubberley asserts:...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionPolitician
Date of Birth4 May 1796
CityFranklin, MA
CountryUnited States of America
The object of punishment is prevention from evil; it can never be made impulsive to good.
There may be frugality which is not economy. A community, that withholds the means of education from its children, withholds the bread of life and starves their souls.
If any man seeks for greatness, let him forget greatness and ask for truth, and he will find both.
Under the Providence of God, our means of education are the grand machinery by which the 'raw material' of human nature can be worked up into inventors and discoverers, into skilled artisans and scientific farmers, into scholars and jurists, into the founders of benevolent institutions, and the great expounders of ethical and theological science.
It is well when the wise and the learned discover new truths; but how much better to diffuse the truths already discovered amongst the multitudes. Every addition to true knowledge is an addition to human power; and while a philosopher is discovering one new truth, millions of truths may be propagated amongst the people.... The whole land must be watered with the streams of knowledge.
The earth flourishes, or is overrun with noxious weeds and brambles, as we apply or withhold the cultivating hand. So fares it with the intellectual system of man.
Time is a seedfield; in youth we sow it with causes; in after life we reap the harvest of effects.
Give me a house furnished with books rather than furniture! Both, if you can, but books at any rate!
Ignorance breeds monsters to fill up the vacancies of the soul that are unoccupied by the verities of knowledge.
We who are engaged in the sacred cause of education are entitled to look upon all parents as having given hostages to our cause.
Much that we call evil is really good in disguises; and we should not quarrel rashly with adversities not yet understood, nor overlook the mercies often bound up in them.
If evil is inevitable, how are the wicked accountable? Nay, why do we call men wicked at all? Evil is inevitable, but is also remediable.
Scientific truth is marvelous, but moral truth is divine and whoever breathes its air and walks by its light has found the lost paradise.
But let a man know that there are things to be known, of which he is ignorant, and it is so much carved out of his domain of universal knowledge.