Horace Mann (1796 – 1859)
“The Father of American Education”

[ Horace Mann was a deist: God is more to me than a grand and solitary Being, though refulgent with infinite perfections. Contemplated as enthroned in the midst of his works, his spiritual offspring in all the grand circuit of the worlds he has formed become a multiplying glass, reflecting back the Original in the profusion and countlessness of infinity. Nevertheless, Horace Mann was very wise. He advocated for a “common experience” for all elementary education.
[Mann] was the prophet of the idea of the absolute necessity of free public education for the existence and preservation of a democratic way of life.
 ~ John Dewey ~ ]

Education is our only political safety.

A human being is not attaining his full heights until he is educated.

If any man seeks for greatness, let him forget greatness and ask for truth, and he will find both. (Enrich and embellish the universe as you will, it is only a fit temple for the heart that loves truth with a supreme love. Inanimate vastness excites wonder; knowledge kindles admiration, but love enraptures the soul.)

A teacher who is attempting to teach without inspiring the pupil with a desire to learn is hammering cold iron.

Genius may conceive but patient labor must consummate.

Teachers teach because they care. Teaching young people is what they do best. It requires long hours, patience, and care.

So much, then, my friends, is done, in the common and established course of nature, for the welfare of our children. Nature supplies a perennial force, unexhausted, inexhaustible, re-appearing whenever and wherever the parental relation exists. We, then, who are engaged in the sacred cause of education, are entitled to look upon all parents as having given hostages to our cause; and, just as soon as we can make them see the true relation in which they and their children stand to this cause, they will become advocates for its advancement, more ardent and devoted than ourselves.

[A] knowledge what to select and how to pursue, is as necessary to the highest happiness as virtue herself. Virtue is an angel, but she is a blind one, and must ask of Knowledge to show her the pathway that leads to her goal.

The man or the institution, therefore, that withholds knowledge from a child, or from a race of children, exercises the awful power of changing the world in which they are to live, just as much as though he should annihilate all that is most lovely and grand in this planet of ours, or transport the victim of his cruelty to some dark and frigid zone of the universe, where the sweets of knowledge are unknown, and the terrors of ignorance hold their undisputed and remorseless reign.

The most ignorant are the most conceited. Unless a man knows that there is something more to be known, his inference is, of course, that he knows every thing. Such a man always usurps the throne of universal knowledge, and assumes the right of deciding all possible questions. We all know that a conceited dunce will decide questions extemporaneous which would puzzle a college of philosophers, or a bench of judges. Ignorant and shallow-minded men do not see far enough to see the difficulty.

To know how much there is that we do not know, is one of the most valuable parts of our attainments; for such knowledge becomes both a lesson of humility and a stimulus to exertion.

Education alone can conduct us to that enjoyment which is, at once, best in quality and infinite in quantity.

If ever there was a cause, if ever there can be a cause, worthy to be upheld by all of toil or sacrifice that the human heart can endure, it is the cause of Education.

Let us labor for that larger and larger comprehension of truth, that more and more thorough repudiation of error, which shall make the history of mankind a series of ascending developments.

The creation is a museum, all full, and crowded with wonders and beauties and glories. One door, and one only is open, by which you can enter this magnificent temple. It is the door of Knowledge. The learned laborer, the learned peasant, or slave, is ever made welcome at this door, while the ignorant, though kings, are shut out.

Every addition to true knowledge is an addition to human power.

Every hand and every hour should be devoted to rescue the world from its insanity of guilt, and to assuage the pangs of human hearts with balm and anodyne. To pity distress is but human; to relieve it is Godlike.

Books are the windows through which the soul looks out. A house without books is like a room without windows.

The love of knowledge comes with reading and grows upon it.

Jails and prisons are the complement of schools; so many less as you have of the latter, so many more must you have of the former.

Habit is a cable. We weave a thread of it every day, and at last we cannot break it.

Ignorance breeds monsters to fill up all the vacancies of the soul that are unoccupied by the verities of knowledge.

The intellectual and moral nature of man is the one thing precious in the sight of God...

Until the immortal and god-like capacities of every being that comes iuto the world are deemed more worthy, are watched more tenderly than any other thing, no dynasty of men, or form of government, can stand, or shall stand, upon the face of the earth; and the force or the fraud which would seek to uphold them, shall be but "as fetters of flax to bind the flame."

It is well to think well. It is divine to act well.

Be ashamed to die until you have won some victory for humanity.

You need not tell all the truth, unless to those who have a right to know it all. But let all you tell be truth.

It is more difficult, and it calls for higher energies of soul, to live a martyr than to die one.

Let but the public mind become once thoroughly corrupt, and all attempts to secure property, liberty or life, by mere force of laws written on parchment, will be as vain as to put up printed notices in an orchard to keep off the canker-worms.

He who cannot resist temptation is not a man. He is wanting in the highest attributes of humanity.

Ten men have failed from defect in morals, where one has failed from defect in intellect.

Every school boy and school girl who has arrived at the age of reflection ought to know something about the history of the art of printing, papermaking, and so forth. … All children will work better if pleased with their tools; and there are no tools more ingeniously wrought, or more potent than those which belong to the art of the printer. …Hostile parties, and sometimes hostile nations, instead of fitting out martial or naval expeditions, establish printing presses, and discharge pamphlets or octavoes at each other, instead of cannon balls…
“But through this instrumentality good can be wrought as well as evil. Knowledge can be acquired, diffused, perpetuated. An invisible, inaudible, intangible thought in the silent chambers of the mind, breaks away from its confinement, becomes imbodied in a sign, is multiplied by myriads, traverses the earth, and goes resounding down to the latest posterity.