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.
You don't understand anything until you learn it more than one way.
Since belief determines behavior, doesn't it make sense that we should be teaching ethical, moral values in every home and in every school in America?
You can’t learn to write in college. It’s a very bad place for writers because the teachers always think they know more than you do—and they don’t. They have prejudices. They may like Henry James, but what if you don’t want to write like Henry James? They may like John Irving, for instance, who’s the bore of all time. A lot of the people whose work they’ve taught in the schools for the last thirty years, I can’t understand why people read them and why they are taught.
If you look at other countries, you'll find lots of girls doing physics, engineering, and science. It's something to do with the kind of culture we have in the English-speaking world about what's appropriate for each of the two sexes.
Whenever I start a book, I swear it's going to be a short one. But then it's, 'Who was his grandfather? And how did he get there in the first place? And what kind of animals is he chasing?'
It used to take me all vacation to grow a new hide in place of the one they flogged off me during school term.
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