There is nothing so costly as ignorance.
Interpretation
Ignorance can lead to significant costs and consequences in life.
Horace Mann highlights the idea that ignorance, or lack of knowledge, is not just a personal disadvantage but also a costly one. It suggests that the absence of understanding can lead to poor decisions and missed opportunities, ultimately resulting in greater expenses—whether in terms of money, time, or lost potential. By emphasizing that ignorance is 'costly,' Mann advocates for the importance of education and awareness in personal and societal progress.
In practice
During a speech on the importance of education, I could say, 'As Horace Mann wisely stated, there is nothing so costly as ignorance.'
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.
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.
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.
School days, I believe, are the unhappiest in the whole span of human existence.
Nothing is so well learned as that which is discovered.
I learned to read a little in my primer, to write my own name, and to cypher some in the three first rules in figures. And this was all the schooling I ever had in my life, up to this day. I should have continued longer if it hadn't been that I concluded I couldn't do any longer without a wife, and so I cut out to hunt me one.
Give your child a single valuable idea, and you have done more for his education than if you had laid upon his mind the burden of bushels of information.
I've learned that you learn best by modeling. If you want people to learn, do it!
Many problems are so complex that even if we had the money to fix them, we wouldn't know how to do it. Fixing inner-city schools, reducing obesity, creating peace in the Middle East are just a few examples.
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