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.
Interpretation
Withholding education from children is detrimental to their development and well-being.
Horace Mann emphasizes the critical importance of education for children, arguing that depriving them of this essential resource is akin to starving their souls. He distinguishes between mere frugality and true economy, suggesting that true economic prudence includes investing in the education and well-being of future generations, as it enriches both individuals and society as a whole.
In practice
This quote can be shared in a speech advocating for educational reform.
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.
Be ashamed to die until you have won some victory for humanity.
Let us labor for that larger comprehension of truth, and that more thorough repudiation of error, which shall make the history of mankind a series of ascending developments.
Great knowledge is requisite to instruct those who have been well instructed, but still greater knowledge is requisite to instruct those who have been neglected.
Virtue is an angel, but she is a blind one, and must ask Knowledge to show her the pathway that leads to her goal.
Genius may conceive but patient labor must consummate.
Our global future depends on the willingness of every nation to invest in its people, especially women and children.
One summer morning at sunrise a long time ago I met a little girl with a book under her arm. I asked her why she was out so early and she answered that there were too many books and far too little time. And there she was absolutely right.
Black is beautiful when it is a slum kid studying to enter college, when it is a man learning new skills for a new job. . . .
All children are artists, and it is an indictment of our culture that so many of them lose their creativity, their unfettered imaginations, as they grow older.
School-leavers unfortunately will come away thinking the First World War consisted simply of 'going over the top' on the Western Front to slaughter in no-man's-land, when the conflict extended so much further, to the collapse of four empires and numerous civil wars.
I have a list of titles that I leave at the [library] desk, because they are bound to be written some day, and it's best to be ahead of the queue.
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