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
Education is an organic necessity of a human being.
Give me a house furnished with books rather than furniture! Both, if you can, but books at any rate!
Time is a seedfield; in youth we sow it with causes; in after life we reap the harvest of effects.
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.
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.
When a child can be brought to tears, and not from fear of punishment, but from repentance he needs no chastisement. When the tears begin to flow from the grief of their conduct you can be sure there is an angel nestling in their heart.
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.
Without undervaluing any other human agency, it may be safely affirmed that the Common School, improved and energized, as it can easily be, may become the most effective and benignant of all the forces of civilization. Two reasons sustain this position. In the first place, there is a universality in its operation, which can be affirmed of no other institution whatever... And, in the second place, the materials upon which it operates are so pliant and ductile as to be susceptible of assuming a greater variety of forms than any other earthly work of the Creator.
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.
Avoid witticisms at the expense of others.
Observation - activity of both eyes and ears.
After a child has arrived at the legal age for attending school,-whether he be the child of noble or of peasant,-the only two absolute grounds of exemption from attendance are sickness and death.